The Essential Drucker

BOOKS BY PETER F. DRUCKER

MANAGEMENT

The Essential Drucker

Management Challenges for the 21st Century

Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management

Managing in a Time of Great Change

Managing for the Future

Managing the Non-Profit Organization

The Frontiers of Management

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The Changing World of the Executive

Managing in Turbulent Times

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Technology, Management and Society

The Effective Executive

Managing for Results

The Practice of Management

Concept of the Corporation

ECONOMICS, POLITICS, SOCIETY

Post-Capitalist Society

Drucker on Asia

The Ecological Revolution

The New Realities

Toward the Next Economics

The Pension Fund Revolution

Men, Ideas, and Politics

The Age of Discontinuity

Landmarks of Tomorrow

America’s Next Twenty Years

The New Society

The Future of Industrial Man

The End of Economic Man

AUTOGRAPHY

Adventures of a Bystander

FICTION

The Temptation to Do Good

The Last of all Possible Worlds

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A DF Books NERDs Release

THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER. Copyright © 2001 Peter F. Drucker. All

rights reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been

granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access and

read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may

be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse

engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information

storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether

electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented,

without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of

HarperCollins Publishers

Mobipocket Reader edition v 1. May 2001 ISBN: 0-0607-7132-1

Print edition first published in 2001 by HarperCollins

Publishers, Inc.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Origin and Purpose of

The Essential Drucker

I. MANAGEMENT

1. Management as Social Function and Liberal Art

2. The Dimensions of Management

3. The Purpose and objectives of a Business

4. What the Nonprofits Are Teaching Business

5. Social Impacts and Social Problems

6. Management’s New Paradigms

7. The Information Executives Need Today

8. Management by Objectives and Self-Control

9. Picking People—The Basic Rules

10. The Entrepreneurial Business

11. The New Venture

12. Entrepreneurial Strategies

II. THE INDIVIDUAL

13. Effectiveness Must Be Learned

14. Focus on Contribution

15. Know Your Strengths and Values

16. Know Your Time

17. Effective Decisions

18. Functioning Communications

19. Leadership as Work

20. Principles of Innovation

21. The Second Half of Your Life

22. The Educated Person

III. SOCIETY

23. A Century of Social Transformation—Emergence of Knowledge

Society

24. The Coming of Entrepreneurial Society

25. Citizenship through the Social Sector

26. From Analysis to Perception—The New Worldview

Afterword: The Challenge Ahead

About the Author

Credits

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION:

THE ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF

THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER

The Essential Drucker is a selection from my sixty years of

work and writing on management. It begins with my book The Future

of Industrial Man (1942) and ends (so far at least) with my 1999

book Management Challenges for the 21st Century.

The Essential Drucker has two purposes. First, it offers, I

hope, a coherent and fairly comprehensive Introduction to

Management. But second, it gives an Overview of my works on

management and thus answers a question that my editors and I have

been asked again and again, Where do I start to read Drucker?

Which of his writings are essential?

Atsuo Ueda, longtime Japanese friend, first conceived The

Essential Drucker. He himself has had a distinguished career in

Japanese management. And having reached the age of sixty, he

recently started a second career and became the founder and chief

executive officer of a new technical university in Tokyo. But for

thirty years Mr. Ueda has also been my Japanese translator and

editor. He has actually translated many of my books several times

as they went into new Japanese editions. He is thus thoroughly

familiar with my work—in fact, he knows it better than I do. As a

result he increasingly got invited to conduct Japanese conferences

and seminars on my work and found himself being asked over and

over again—especially by younger people, both students and

executives at the start of their careers—Where do I start reading

Drucker?

This led Mr. Ueda to reread my entire work, to select from it

the most pertinent chapters and to abridge them so that they read

as if they had originally been written as one cohesive text. The

result was a three-volume essential Drucker of fifty-seven

chapters—one volume on the management of organizations; one volume

on the individual in the society of organizations; one on society

in general—which was published in Japan in the summer and fall of

2000 and has met with great success. It is also being published in

Taiwan, mainland China and Korea, and in Argentina, Mexico, and

Brazil.

It is Mr. Ueda’s text that is being used for the U.S. and U.K.

editions of The Essential Drucker. But these editions not only are

less than half the size of Mr. Ueda’s original Japanese

version—twenty-six chapters versus the three-volumes’ fifty-seven.

They also have a somewhat different focus. Cass Canfield Jr. at

HarperCollins in the United States—longtime friend and my U.S.

editor for over thirty years—also came to the conclusion a few

years ago that there was need for an introduction to, and overview

of, my sixty years of management writings. But he—rightly—saw that

the U.S. and U.K. (and probably altogether the Western) audience

for such a work would be both broader and narrower than the

audience for the Japanese venture. It would be broader because

there is in the West a growing number of people who, while not

themselves executives, have come to see management as an area of

public interest; there are also an increasing number of students

in colleges and universities who, while not necessarily management

students, see an understanding of management as part of a general

education; and, finally, there are a large and rapidly growing

number of mid-career managers and professionals who are flocking

to advanced-executive programs, both in universities and in their

employing organizations. The focus would, however, also be

narrower because these additional audiences need and want less an

introduction to, and overview of, Drucker’s work than they want a

concise, comprehensive, and sharply focused Introduction to

Management, and to management alone. And thus, while using Mr.

Ueda’s editing and abridging, Cass Canfield Jr. (with my full,

indeed my enthusiastic, support) selected and edited the texts

from the Japanese three-volume edition into a comprehensive,

cohesive, and self-contained introduction to management—both of

the management of an enterprise and of the self-management of the

individual, whether executive or professional, within an

enterprise and altogether in our society of managed organizations.

My readers as well as I owe to both Atsuo Ueda and Cass

Canfield Jr. an enormous debt of gratitude. The two put an

incredible amount of work and dedication into The Essential

Drucker. And the end product is not only the best introduction to

one’s work any author could possibly have asked for. It is also, I

am convinced, a truly unique, cohesive, and self-contained

introduction to management, its basic principles and concerns; its

problems, challenges, opportunities.

This volume, as said before, is also an overview of my works on

management. Readers may therefore want to know where to go in my

books to further pursue this or that topic or this or that area of

particular interest to them. Here, therefore, are the sources in

my books for each of twenty-six chapters of the The Essential

Drucker:

Chapter 1 and 26 are excerpted from The New Realities (1988).

Chapters 2, 3, 5, 18 are excerpted from Management, Tasks,

Responsibilities, Practices (1974).

Chapters 4 and 19 are excerpted from Managing for the Future

(1992), and were first published in the Harvard Business Review

(1989) and in the Wall Street Journal (1988), respectively.

Chapters 6, 15, and 21 are excerpted from Management Challenges

for the 21st Century (1999).

Chapters 7 and 23 are excerpted from Management in a Time of

Great Change (1995) and were first published in the Harvard

Business Review (1994) and in the Atlantic Monthly (1996),

respectively.

Chapter 8 was excerpted from The Practice of Management (1954).

Chapter 9 was excerpted from The Frontiers of Management (1986)

and was first published in the Harvard Business Review (1985).

Chapters 10, 11, 12, 20, 24 were excerpted from Innovation and

Entrepreneurship (1985).

Chapters 13, 14, 16, 17 were excerpted from The Effective

Executive (1966).

Chapters 22 and 25 were excerpted from Post-Capitalist Society

(1993).

All these books are still in print in the United States and in

many other countries.

This one-volume edition of The Essential Drucker does not,

however, include any excerpts from five important Management books

of mine: The Future of Industrial Man (1942); Concept of the

Corporation (1946); Managing for Results (1964; the first book on

what is now called “strategy,” a term unknown for business forty

years ago); Managing in Turbulent Times (1980); Managing the

Non-Profit Organization (1990). These are important books and

still widely read and used. But their subject matter is more

specialized—and in some cases also more technical—than that of the

books from which the chapters of the present book were chosen—and

thus had to be left out of a work that calls itself Essential.

—Peter F. Drucker

Claremont, California

Spring 2001

I.

MANAGEMENT

1.

MANAGEMENT AS

SOCIAL FUNCTION AND

LIBERAL ART

When Karl Marx was beginning work on Das Kapital in the 1850s,

the phenomenon of management was unknown. So were the enterprises

that managers run. The largest manufacturing company around was a

Manchester cotton mill employing fewer than three hundred people

and owned by Marx’s friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. And

in Engels’s mill—one of the most profitable businesses of its

day—there were no “managers,” only “charge hands” who, themselves

workers, enforced discipline over a handful of fellow

“proletarians.”

Rarely in human history has any institution emerged as quickly

as management or had as great an impact so fast. In less than 150

years, management has transformed the social and economic fabric

of the world’s developed countries. It has created a global

economy and set new rules for countries that would participate in

that economy as equals. And it has itself been transformed. Few

executives are aware of the tremendous impact management has had.

Indeed, a good many are like M. Jourdain, the character in

Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who did not know that he spoke

prose. They barely realize that they practice—or

mispractice—management. As a result, they are ill prepared for the

tremendous challenges that now confront them. The truly important

problems managers face do not come from technology or politics;

they do not originate outside of management and enterprise. They

are problems caused by the very success of management itself.

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the

same: to make people capable of joint performance through common

goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and

development they need to perform and to respond to change. But the

very meaning of this task has changed, if only because the

performance of management has converted the workforce from one

composed largely of unskilled laborers to one of highly educated

knowledge workers.

The Origins and Development of Management

On the threshold of World War I, a few thinkers were just

becoming aware of management’s existence. But few people even in

the most advanced countries had anything to do with it. Now the

largest single group in the labor force, more than one-third of

the total, are people whom the U.S. Bureau of the Census calls

“managerial and professional.” Management has been the main agent

of this transformation. Management explains why, for the first

time in human history, we can employ large numbers of

knowledgeable, skilled people in productive work. No earlier

society could do this. Indeed, no earlier society could support

more than a handful of such people. Until quite recently, no one

knew how to put people with different skills and knowledge

together to achieve common goals.

Eighteenth-century China was the envy of contemporary Western

intellectuals because it supplied more jobs for educated people

than all of Europe did—some twenty thousand per year. Today, the

United States, with about the same population China then had,

graduates nearly a million college students a year, few of whom

have the slightest difficulty finding well-paid employment.

Management enables us to employ them.

Knowledge, especially advanced knowledge, is always

specialized. By itself it produces nothing. Yet a modern business,

and not only the largest ones, may employ up to ten thousand

highly knowledgeable people who represent up to sixty different

knowledge areas. Engineers of all sorts, designers, marketing

experts, economists, statisticians, psychologists, planners,

accountants, human-resources people—all working together in a

joint venture. None would be effective without the managed

enterprise.

There is no point in asking which came first, the educational

explosion of the last one hundred years or the management that put

this knowledge to productive use. Modern management and modern

enterprise could not exist without the knowledge base that

developed societies have built. But equally, it is management, and

management alone, that makes effective all this knowledge and

these knowledgeable people. The emergence of management has

converted knowledge from social ornament and luxury into the true

capital of any economy.

Not many business leaders could have predicted this development

back in 1870, when large enterprises were first beginning to take

shape. The reason was not so much lack of foresight as lack of

precedent. At that time, the only large permanent organization

around was the army. Not surprisingly, therefore, its

command-and-control structure became the model for the men who

were putting together transcontinental railroads, steel mills,

modern banks, and department stores. The command model, with a

very few at the top giving orders and a great many at the bottom

obeying them, remained the norm for nearly one hundred years. But

it was never as static as its longevity might suggest. On the

contrary, it began to change almost at once, as specialized

knowledge of all sorts poured into enterprise.

The first university-trained engineer in manufacturing industry

was hired by Siemens in Germany in 1867—his name was Friedrich von

Hefner-Alteneck. Within five years he had built a research

department. Other specialized departments followed suit. By World

War I the standard functions of a manufacturer had been developed:

research and engineering, manufacturing, sales, finance and

accounting, and a little later, human resources (or personnel).

Even more important for its impact on enterprise—and on the

world economy in general—was another management-directed

development that took place at this time. That was the application

of management to manual work in the form of training. The child of

wartime necessity, training has propelled the transformation of

the world economy in the last forty years because it allows

low-wage countries to do something that traditional economic

theory had said could never be done: to become efficient—and yet

still low-wage—competitors almost overnight.

Adam Smith reported that it took several hundred years for a

country or region to develop a tradition of labor and the

expertise in manual and managerial skills needed to produce and

market a given product, whether cotton textiles or violins.

During World War I, however, large numbers of unskilled,

preindustrial people had to be made productive workers in

practically no time. To meet this need, businesses in the United

States and the United Kingdom began to apply the theory of

scientific management developed by Frederick W. Taylor between

1885 and 1910 to the systematic training of blue-collar workers on

a large scale. They analyzed tasks and broke them down into

individual, unskilled operations that could then be learned quite

quickly. Further developed in World War II, training was then

picked up by the Japanese and, twenty years later, by the South

Koreans, who made it the basis for their countries’ phenomenal

development.

During the 1920s and 1930s, management was applied to many more

areas and aspects of the manufacturing business. Decentralization,

for instance, arose to combine the advantages of bigness and the

advantages of smallness within one enterprise. Accounting went

from “bookkeeping” to analysis and control. Planning grew out of

the “Gantt charts” designed in 1917 and 1918 to plan war

production; and so did the use of analytical logic and statistics,

which employ quantification to convert experience and intuition

into definitions, information, and diagnosis. Marketing evolved as

a result of applying management concepts to distribution and

selling. Moreover, as early as the mid-1920s and early 1930s, some

American management pioneers such as Thomas Watson Sr. at the

fledgling IBM; Robert E. Wood at Sears, Roebuck; and George Elton

Mayo at the Harvard Business School began to question the way

manufacturing was organized. They concluded that the assembly line

was a short-term compromise. Despite its tremendous productivity,

it was poor economics because of its inflexibility, poor use of

human resources, even poor engineering. They began the thinking

and experimenting that eventually led to “automation” as the way

to organize the manufacturing process, and to teamwork, quality

circles, and the information-based organization as the way to

manage human resources. Every one of these managerial innovations

represented the application of knowledge to work, the substitution

of system and information for guesswork, brawn, and toil. Every

one, to use Frederick Taylor’s term, replaced “working harder”

with “working smarter.”

The powerful effect of these changes became apparent during

World War II. To the very end, the Germans were by far the better

strategists. Having much shorter interior lines, they needed fewer

support troops and could match their opponents in combat strength.

Yet the Allies won—their victory achieved by management. The

United States, with one-fifth the population of all the other

belligerents combined, had almost as many men in uniform. Yet it

produced more war materiél than all the others taken together. It

managed to transport the stuff to fighting fronts as far apart as

China, Russia, India, Africa, and Western Europe. No wonder, then,

that by the war’s end almost all the world had become

management-conscious. Or that management emerged as a recognizably

distinct kind of work, one that could be studied and developed

into a discipline—as happened in each country that has enjoyed

economic leadership during the postwar period.

After World War II we began to see that management is not

exclusively business management. It pertains to every human effort

that brings together in one organization people of diverse

knowledge and skills. It needs to be applied to all third-sector

institutions, such as hospitals, universities, churches, arts

organizations, and social service agencies, which since World War

II have grown faster in the United States than either business or

government. For even though the need to manage volunteers or raise

funds may differentiate nonprofit managers from their for-profit

peers, many more of their responsibilities are the same—among them

defining the right strategy and goals, developing people,

measuring performance, and marketing the organization’s services.

Management worldwide has become the new social function.

Management and Entrepreneurship

One important advance in the discipline and practice of

management is that both now embrace entrepreneurship and

innovation. A sham fight these days pits “management” against

“entrepreneurship” as adversaries, if not as mutually exclusive.

That’s like saying that the fingering hand and the bow hand of the

violinist are “adversaries” or “mutually exclusive.” Both are

always needed and at the same time. And both have to be

coordinated and work together. Any existing organization, whether

a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, goes down fast

if it does not innovate. Conversely, any new organization, whether

a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, collapses if

it does not manage. Not to innovate is the single largest reason

for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to

manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new

ventures.

Yet few management books have paid attention to

entrepreneurship and innovation. One reason is that during the

period after World War II when most of those books were written,

managing the existing rather than innovating the new and different

was the dominant task. During this period most institutions

developed along lines laid down thirty or fifty years earlier.

This has now changed dramatically. We have again entered an era of

innovation, and it is by no means confined to “high-tech” or to

technology generally. In fact, social innovation—as this chapter

tries to make clear—may be of greater importance and have much

greater impact than any scientific or technical invention.

Furthermore, we now have a “discipline” of entrepreneurship and

innovation (see my Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1986). It is

clearly a part of management and rests, indeed, on well-known and

tested management principles. It applies to both existing

organizations and new ventures, and to both business and

nonbusiness institutions, including government.

The Accountability of Management

Management books tend to focus on the function of management

inside its organization. Few yet accept it as a social function.

But it is precisely because management has become so pervasive as

a social function that it faces its most serious challenge. To

whom is management accountable? And for what? On what does

management base its power? What gives it legitimacy?

These are not business questions or economic questions. They

are political questions. Yet they underlie the most serious

assault on management in its history—a far more serious assault

than any mounted by Marxists or labor unions: the hostile

takeover. An American phenomenon at first, it has spread

throughout the non-Communist developed world. What made it

possible was the emergence of the employee pension funds as the

controlling shareholders of publicly owned companies. The pension

funds, while legally “owners,” are economically “investors”—and,

indeed, often “speculators.” They have no interest in the

enterprise and its welfare. In fact, in the United States at least

they are “trustees,” and are not supposed to consider anything but

immediate pecuniary gain. What underlies the takeover bid is the

postulate that the enterprise’s sole function is to provide the

largest possible immediate gain to the shareholder. In the absence

of any other justification for management and enterprise, the

“raider” with his hostile takeover bid prevails—and only too often

immediately dismantles or loots the going concern, sacrificing

long-range, wealth-producing capacity to short-term gains.

Management—and not only in the business enterprise—has to be

accountable for performance. But how is performance to be defined?

How is it to be measured? How is it to be enforced? And to whom

should management be accountable? That these questions can be

asked is in itself a measure of the success and importance of

management. That they need to be asked is, however, also an

indictment of managers. They have not yet faced up to the fact

that they represent power—and power has to be accountable, has to

be legitimate. They have not yet faced up to the fact that they

matter.

What Is Management?

But what is management? Is it a bag of techniques and tricks? A

bundle of analytical tools like those taught in business schools?

These are important, to be sure, just as thermometer and anatomy

are important to the physician. But the evolution and history of

management—its successes as well as its problems—teach that

management is, above all else, based on a very few, essential

principles. To be specific:

Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people

capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective

and their weaknesses irrelevant. This is what organization is all

about, and it is the reason that management is the critical,

determining factor. These days, practically all of us work for a

managed institution, large or small, business or nonbusiness. We

depend on management for our livelihoods. And our ability to

contribute to society also depends as much on the management of

the organization for which we work as it does on our own skills,

dedication, and effort.

Because management deals with the integration of people in a

common venture, it is deeply embedded in culture. What managers do

in West Germany, in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in

Japan, or in Brazil is exactly the same. How they do it may be

quite different. Thus one of the basic challenges managers in a

developing country face is to find and identify those parts of

their own tradition, history, and culture that can be used as

management building blocks. The difference between Japan’s

economic success and India’s relative backwardness is largely

explained by the fact that Japanese managers were able to plant

imported management concepts in their own cultural soil and make

them grow.

Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared

values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is

only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying

objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough

and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it

have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s

first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those

objectives, values, and goals.

Management must also enable the enterprise and each of its

members to grow and develop as needs and opportunities change.

Every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution. Training

and development must be built into it on all levels—training and

development that never stop.

Every enterprise is composed of people with different skills

and knowledge doing many different kinds of work. It must be built

on communication and on individual responsibility. All members

need to think through what they aim to accomplish—and make sure

that their associates know and understand that aim. All have to

think through what they owe to others—and make sure that others

understand. All have to think through what they in turn need from

others—and make sure that others know what is expected of them.

Neither the quantity of output nor the “bottom line” is by

itself an adequate measure of the performance of management and

enterprise. Market standing, innovation, productivity, development

of people, quality, financial results—all are crucial to an

organization’s performance and to its survival. Nonprofit

institutions too need measurements in a number of areas specific

to their mission. Just as a human being needs a diversity of

measures to assess his or her health and performance, an

organization needs a diversity of measures to assess its health

and performance. Performance has to be built into the enterprise

and its management; it has to be measured—or at least judged—and

it has to be continually improved.

Finally, the single most important thing to remember about any

enterprise is that results exist only on the outside. The result

of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is

a healed patient. The result of a school is a student who has

learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an

enterprise, there are only costs.

Managers who understand these principles and function in their

light will be achieving, accomplished managers.

Management as a Liberal Art

Thirty years ago the English scientist and novelist C. P. Snow

talked of the “two cultures” of contemporary society. Management,

however, fits neither Snow’s “humanist” nor his “scientist.” It

deals with action and application; and its test is results. This

makes it a technology. But management also deals with people,

their values, their growth and development—and this makes it a

humanity. So does its concern with, and impact on, social

structure and the community. Indeed, as everyone has learned who,

like this author, has been working with managers of all kinds of

institutions for long years, management is deeply involved in

moral concerns—the nature of man, good and evil.

Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal

art—“liberal” because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge,

self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; “art” because it is also

concerned with practice and application. Managers draw on all the

knowledges and insights of the humanities and the social

sciences—on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history,

on ethics—as well as on the physical sciences. But they have to

focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results—on healing a

sick patient, teaching a student, building a bridge, designing and

selling a “user-friendly” software program.

For these reasons, management will increasingly be the

discipline and the practice through which the “humanities” will

again acquire recognition, impact, and relevance.

2.

THE DIMENSIONS

OF MANAGEMENT

Business enterprises—and public-service institutions as

well—are organs of society. They do not exist for their own sake,

but to fulfill a specific social purpose and to satisfy a specific

need of a society, a community, or individuals. They are not ends

in themselves, but means. The right question to ask in respect to

them is not, What are they? but, What are they supposed to be

doing and what are their tasks?

Management, in turn, is the organ of the institution.

The question, What is management? comes second. First we have

to define management in and through its tasks.

There are three tasks, equally important but essentially

different, that management has to perform to enable the

institution in its charge to function and to make its

contribution.

Establishing the specific purpose and mission of the

institution, whether business enterprise, hospital, or university

Making work productive and the worker effective

Managing social impacts and social responsibilities

Mission

An institution exists for a specific purpose and mission; it

has a specific social function. In the business enterprise, this

means economic performance.

With respect to this first task, the task of economic

performance, business and nonbusiness institutions differ. In

respect to every other task, they are similar. But only business

has economic performance as its specific mission; it is the

definition of a business that it exists for the sake of economic

performance. In all other institutions—hospital, church,

university, or armed services—economic considerations are a

restraint. In business enterprise, economic performance is the

rationale and purpose.

Business management must always, in every decision and action,

put economic performance first. It can justify its existence and

its authority only by the economic results it produces. A business

management has failed if it does not produce economic results. It

has failed if it does not supply goods and services desired by the

consumer at a price the consumer is willing to pay. It has failed

if it does not improve, or at least maintain, the wealth-producing

capacity of the economic resources entrusted to it. And this,

whatever the economic or political structure or ideology of a

society, means responsibility for profitability.

Worker Achievement

The second task of management is to make work productive and

the worker effective. A business enterprise (or any other

institution) has only one true resource: people. It succeeds by

making human resources productive. It accomplishes its goals

through work. To make work productive is, therefore, an essential

function. But at the same time, these institutions in today’s

society are increasingly the means through which individual human

beings find their livelihood, find their access to social status,

to community and to individual achievement and satisfaction. To

make the worker productive is, therefore, more and more important

and is a measure of the performance of an institution. It is

increasingly a task of management.

Organizing work according to its own logic is only the first

step. The second and far more difficult one is making work

suitable for human beings—and their logic is radically different

from the logic of work. Making the worker achieving implies

consideration of the human being as an organism having peculiar

physiological and psychological properties, abilities, and

limitations, and a distinct mode of action.

Social Responsibilities

The third task of management is managing the social impacts and

the social responsibilities of the enterprise. None of our

institutions exists by itself and is an end in itself. Every one

is an organ of society and exists for the sake of society.

Business is no exception. Free enterprise cannot be justified as

being good for business; it can be justified only as being good

for society.

Business exists to supply goods and services to customers,

rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers, or even

dividends to stockholders. The hospital does not exist for the

sake of doctors and nurses, but for the sake of patients whose one

and only desire is to leave the hospital cured and never come

back. Psychologically, geographically, culturally, and socially,

institutions must be part of the community.

To discharge its job, to produce economic goods and services,

the business enterprise has to have impact on people, on

communities, and on society. It has to have power and authority

over people, e.g., employees, whose own ends and purposes are not

defined by and within the enterprise. It has to have impact on the

community as a neighbor, as the source of jobs and tax revenue

(but also of waste products and pollutants). And, increasingly, in

our pluralist society of organizations, it has to add to its

fundamental concern for the quantities of life—i.e., economic

goods and services—concern for the quality of life, that is, for

the physical, human, and social environment of modern man and

modern community.

3.

THE PURPOSE AND

OBJECTIVES OF

A BUSINESS

Asked what a business is, the typical businessman is likely to

answer, “An organization to make a profit.” The typical economist

is likely to give the same answer. This answer is not only false,

it is irrelevant.

The prevailing economic theory of the mission of business

enterprise and behavior, the maximization of profit—which is

simply a complicated way of phrasing the old saw of buying cheap

and selling dear—may adequately explain how Richard Sears

operated. But it cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other

business enterprise operates, or how it should operate. The

concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless. The

danger in the concept of profit maximization is that it makes

profitability appear a myth.

Profit and profitability are, however, crucial—for society even

more than for the individual business. Yet profitability is not

the purpose of, but a limiting factor on business enterprise and

business activity. Profit is not the explanation, cause, or

rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather

the test of their validity. If archangels instead of businessmen

sat in directors’ chairs, they would still have to be concerned

with profitability, despite their total lack of personal interest

in making profits.

The root of the confusion is the mistaken belief that the

motive of a person—the so-called profit motive of the

businessman—is an explanation of his behavior or his guide to

right action. Whether there is such a thing as a profit motive at

all is highly doubtful. The idea was invented by the classical

economists to explain the economic reality that their theory of

static equilibrium could not explain. There has never been any

evidence for the existence of the profit motive, and we have long

since found the true explanation of the phenomena of economic

change and growth which the profit motive was first put forth to

explain.

It is irrelevant for an understanding of business behavior,

profit, and profitability, whether there is a profit motive or

not. That Jim Smith is in business to make a profit concerns only

him and the Recording Angel. It does not tell us what Jim Smith

does and how he performs. We do not learn anything about the work

of a prospector hunting for uranium in the Nevada desert by being

told that he is trying to make his fortune. We do not learn

anything about the work of a heart specialist by being told that

he is trying to make a livelihood, or even that he is trying to

benefit humanity. The profit motive and its offspring maximization

of profits are just as irrelevant to the function of a business,

the purpose of a business, and the job of managing a business.

In fact, the concept is worse than irrelevant: it does harm. It

is a major cause of the misunderstanding of the nature of profit

in our society and of the deep-seated hostility to profit, which

are among the most dangerous diseases of an industrial society. It

is largely responsible for the worst mistakes of public policy—in

this country as well as in Western Europe—which are squarely based

on the failure to understand the nature, function, and purpose of

business enterprise. And it is in large part responsible for the

prevailing belief that there is an inherent contradiction between

profit and a company’s ability to make a social contribution.

Actually, a company can make a social contribution only if it is

highly profitable.

To know what a business is, we have to start with its purpose.

Its purpose must lie outside of the business itself. In fact, it

must lie in society since business enterprise is an organ of

society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose:

to create a customer.

Markets are not created by God, nature, or economic forces but

by businesspeople. The want a business satisfies may have been

felt by the customer before he or she was offered the means of

satisfying it. Like food in a famine, it may have dominated the

customer’s life and filled all his waking moments, but it remained

a potential want until the action of businesspeople converted it

into effective demand. Only then is there a customer and a market.

The want may have been unfelt by the potential customer; no one

knew that he wanted a Xerox machine or a computer until these

became available. There may have been no want at all until

business action created it—by innovation, by credit, by

advertising, or by salesmanship. In every case, it is business

action that creates the customer.

It is the customer who determines what a business is. It is the

customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or for a

service converts economic resources into wealth, things into

goods. What the customer buys and considers value is never just a

product. It is always a utility, that is, what a product or

service does for him.

The Purpose of a Business

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business

enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing

and innovation.

Despite the emphasis on marketing and the marketing approach,

marketing is still rhetoric rather than reality in far too many

businesses. “Consumerism” proves this. For what consumerism

demands of business is that it actually market. It demands that

business start out with the needs, the realities, the values, of

the customers. It demands that business define its goal as the

satisfaction of customer needs. It demands that business base its

reward on its contribution to the customer. That after twenty

years of marketing rhetoric consumerism could become a powerful

popular movement proves that not much marketing has been

practiced. Consumerism is the “shame of marketing.”

But consumerism is also the opportunity of marketing. It will

force businesses to become market-focused in their actions as well

as in their pronouncements.

Above all, consumerism should dispel the confusion that largely

explains why there has been so little real marketing. When

managers speak of marketing, they usually mean the organized

performance of all selling functions. This is still selling. It

still starts out with “our products.” It still looks for “our

market.” True marketing starts out the way Sears starts out—with

the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his

values. It does not ask, What do we want to sell? It asks, What

does the customer want to buy? It does not say, This is what our

product or service does. It says, These are the satisfactions the

customer looks for, values, and needs.

Indeed, selling and marketing are antithetical rather than

synonymous or even complementary.

There will always, one can assume, be the need for some

selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so

well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Marketing alone does not make a business enterprise. In a

static economy there are no business enterprises. There are not

even businesspeople. The middleman of a static society is a broker

who receives his compensation in the form of a fee, or a

speculator who creates no value.

A business enterprise can exist only in an expanding economy,

or at least in one that considers change both natural and

acceptable. And business is the specific organ of growth,

expansion, and change.

The second function of a business is, therefore, innovation—the

provision of different economic satisfactions. It is not enough

for the business to provide just any economic goods and services;

it must provide better and more economic ones. It is not necessary

for a business to grow bigger; but it is necessary that it

constantly grow better.

Innovation may result in a lower price—the datum with which the

economist has been most concerned, for the simple reason that it

is the only one that can be handled by quantitative tools. But the

result may also be a new and better product, a new convenience, or

the definition of a new want.

The most productive innovation is a different product or

service creating a new potential of satisfaction, rather than an

improvement. Typically this new and different product costs

more—yet its overall effect is to make the economy more

productive.

The antibiotic drug costs far more than the cold compress,

which was all yesterday’s physician had to fight pneumonia.

Innovation may be finding new uses for old products. A salesman

who succeeds in selling refrigerators to Eskimos to prevent food

from freezing would be as much of an innovator as if he had

developed brand-new processes or invented a new product. To sell

Eskimos a refrigerator to keep food cold is finding a new market;

to sell a refrigerator to keep food from getting too cold is

actually creating a new product. Technologically there is, of

course, only the same old product; but economically there is

innovation.

Above all, innovation is not invention. It is a term of

economics rather than of technology. Nontechnological

innovations—social or economic innovations—are at least as

important as technological ones.

In the organization of the business enterprise, innovation can

no more be considered a separate function than marketing. It is

not confined to engineering or research but extends across all

parts of the business, all functions, all activities. It cannot be

confined to manufacturing. Innovation in distribution has been as

important as innovation in manufacturing; and so has been

innovation in an insurance company or in a bank. Innovation can be

defined as the task of endowing human and material resources with

new and greater wealth-producing capacity.

Managers must convert society’s needs into opportunities for

profitable business. That, too, is a definition of innovation. It

should be stressed today, when we are so conscious of the needs of

society, schools, health-care systems, cities, and environment.

Today’s business enterprise (but also today’s hospital or

government agency) brings together a great many men of high

knowledge and skill, at practically every level of the

organization. But high knowledge and skill also mean

decision-impact on how the work is to be done and on what work is

actually being tackled.

As a result, decisions affecting the entire business and its

capacity to perform are made at all levels of the organization,

even fairly low ones. Risk-taking decisions—what to do and what

not to do; what to continue work on and what to abandon; what

products, markets, and technologies to pursue with energy and what

markets, products, and technologies to ignore—are in the reality

of today’s business enterprise made every day by a host of people

of subordinate rank, very often by people without traditional

managerial title or position, e.g., research scientists, design

engineers, product planners, and tax accountants.

Every one of these men and women bases their decisions on some,

if only vague, theory of the business. Every one, in other words,

has an answer to the question, What is our business and what

should it be? Unless, therefore, the business itself—and that

means its top management—has thought through the question and

formulated the answer—or answers—to it, the decision-makers in the

business, will decide and act on the basis of different,

incompatible, and conflicting theories. They will pull in

different directions without even being aware of their

divergences. But they will also decide and act on the basis of

wrong and misdirecting theories of the business. Common vision,

common understanding, and unity of direction and effort of the

entire organization require definition of “what our business is

and what it should be.”

Nothing may seem simpler or more obvious than to know what a

company’s business is. A steel mill makes steel, a railroad runs

trains to carry freight and passengers, an insurance company

underwrites fire risks, and a bank lends money. Actually, What is

our business? is almost always a difficult question and the right

answer is usually anything but obvious.

The answer to the question, What is our business? is the first

responsibility of top management.

That business purpose and business mission are so rarely given

adequate thought is perhaps the single most important cause of

business frustration and business failure. Conversely, in

outstanding businesses such as the Telephone Company or Sears,

success always rests to a large extent on raising the question,

What is our business? clearly and deliberately, and on answering

it thoughtfully and thoroughly.

With respect to the definition of business purpose and business

mission, there is only one such focus, one starting point. It is

the customer. The customer defines the business. A business is not

defined by the company’s name, statutes, or articles of

incorporation. It is defined by the want the customer satisfies

when he or she buys a product or a service. To satisfy the

customer is the mission and purpose of every business. The

question, What is our business? can, therefore, be answered only

by looking at the business from the outside, from the point of

view of customer and market. All the customer is interested in are

his or her own values, wants, and reality. For this reason alone,

any serious attempt to state “what our business is” must start

with the customer’s realities, his situation, his behavior, his

expectations, and his values.

Who is the customer? is thus the first and most crucial

question to be asked in defining business purpose and business

mission. It is not an easy, let alone an obvious, question. How it

is being answered determines, in large measure, how the business

defines itself.

The consumer—that is, the ultimate user of a product or a

service—is always a customer. But there is never the customer;

there are usually at least two—sometimes more. Each customer

defines a different business, has different expectations and

values, buys something different.

Most businesses have at least two customers. The rug and carpet

industry has both the contractor and the homeowner for its

customers. Both have to buy if there is to be a sale. The

manufacturers of branded consumer goods always have two customers

at the very least: the housewife and the grocer. It does not do

much good to have the housewife eager to buy if the grocer does

not stock the brand. Conversely, it does not do much good to have

the grocer display merchandise advantageously and give it shelf

space if the housewife does not buy.

It is also important to ask, Where is the customer? One of the

secrets of Sears’s success in the 1920s was the discovery that its

old customer was now in a different place: the farmer had become

mobile and was beginning to buy in town.

The next question is, What does the customer buy?

The Cadillac people say that they make an automobile, and their

business is called the Cadillac Motor Division of General Motors.

But does the man who buys a new Cadillac buy transportation, or

does he buy primarily prestige? Does the Cadillac compete with

Chevrolet, Ford, and Volkswagen? Nicholas Dreystadt, the

German-born service mechanic who took over Cadillac in the Great

Depression years of the 1930s, answered: “Cadillac competes with

diamonds and mink coats. The Cadillac customer does not buy

‘transportation’ but ‘status.’ “ This answer saved Cadillac, which

was about to go under. Within two years or so, it made it into a

major growth business despite the depression.

Most managements, if they ask the question at all, ask, What is

our business? when the company is in trouble. Of course, then it

must be asked. And then asking the question may, indeed, have

spectacular results and may even reverse what appears to be

irreversible decline. To wait until a business—or an industry—is

in trouble is playing Russian roulette. It is irresponsible

management. The question should be asked at the inception of a

business—and particularly for a business that has ambitions to

grow. The most important time to ask seriously, What is our

business? is when a company has been successful.

Success always makes obsolete the very behavior that achieved

it. It always creates new realities. It always creates, above all,

its own and different problems. Only the fairy tale ends, “They

lived happily ever after.”

It is not easy for the management of a successful company to

ask, What is our business? Everybody in the company then thinks

that the answer is so obvious as not to deserve discussion. It is

never popular to argue with success, never popular to rock the

boat.

Sooner or later even the most successful answer to the

question, What is our business? becomes obsolete. Very few

definitions of the purpose and mission of a business have anything

like a life expectancy of thirty, let alone fifty, years. To be

good for ten years is probably all one can normally expect.

In asking, What is our business? management therefore also

needs to add, And what will it be? What changes in the environment

are already discernible that are likely to have high impact on the

characteristics, mission, and purpose of our business? and How do

we now build these anticipations into our theory of the business,

into its objectives, strategies, and work assignments?

Again the market, its potential and its trends, is the starting

point. How large a market can we project for our business in five

or ten years—assuming no basic changes in customers, in market

structure, or in technology? And, what factors could validate or

disprove those projections?

The most important of these trends is one to which few

businesses pay much attention: changes in population structure and

population dynamics. Traditionally businessmen, following the

economists, have assumed that demographics are a constant.

Historically this has been a sound assumption. Populations used to

change very slowly except as a result of catastrophic events, such

as major war or famine. This is no longer true, however.

Populations nowadays can and do change drastically, in developed

as well as in developing countries.

The importance of demographics does not lie only in the impact

population structure has on buying power and buying habits, and on

the size and structure of the workforce. Population shifts are the

only events regarding the future for which true prediction is

possible.

Management needs to anticipate changes in market structure

resulting from changes in the economy, from changes in fashion or

taste, and from moves by competition. And competition must always

be defined according to the customer’s concept of what product or

service he buys and thus must include indirect as well as direct

competition.

Finally, management has to ask which of the consumer’s wants

are not adequately satisfied by the products or services offered

him today. The ability to ask this question and to answer it

correctly usually makes the difference between a growth company

and one that depends for its development on the rising tide of the

economy or of the industry. But whoever is content to rise with

the tide will also fall with it.

What Should Our Business Be?

What will our business be? aims at adaptation to anticipated

changes. It aims at modifying, extending, and developing the

existing, ongoing business.

But there is need also to ask, What should our business be?

What opportunities are opening up or can be created to fulfill the

purpose and mission of the business by making it into a different

business?

Businesses that fail to ask this question are likely to miss

their major opportunity.

Next to changes in society, economy, and market as factors

demanding consideration in answering the question What should our

business be? comes, of course, innovation, one’s own and that of

others.

Just as important as the decision on what new and different

things to do is planned, systematic abandonment of the old that no

longer fits the purpose and mission of the business, no longer

conveys satisfaction to the customer or customers, no longer makes

a superior contribution.

An essential step in deciding what our business is, what it

will be, and what it should be is, therefore, systematic analysis

of all existing products, services, processes, markets, end uses,

and distribution channels. Are they still viable? And are they

likely to remain viable? Do they still give value to the customer?

And are they likely to do so tomorrow? Do they still fit the

realities of population and markets, of technology and economy?

And if not, how can we best abandon them—or at least stop pouring

in further resources and efforts? Unless these questions are being

asked seriously and systematically, and unless managements are

willing to act on the answers to them, the best definition of

“what our business is, will be, and should be,” will remain a

pious platitude. Energy will be used up in defending yesterday. No

one will have the time, resources, or will to work on exploiting

today, let alone to work on making tomorrow.

Defining the purpose and mission of the business is difficult,

painful, and risky. But it alone enables a business to set

objectives, to develop strategies, to concentrate its resources,

and to go to work. It alone enables a business to be managed for

performance.

The basic definitions of the business, and of its purpose and

mission, have to be translated into objectives. Otherwise, they

remain insights, good intentions, and brilliant epigrams that

never become achievement.

1. Objectives must be derived from “what our business is, what

it will be, and what it should be.” They are not abstractions.

They are the action commitments through which the mission of a

business is to be carried out, and the standards against which

performance is to be measured. Objectives, in other words,

represent the fundamental strategy of a business.

2. Objectives must be operational. They must be capable of

being converted into specific targets and specific assignments.

They must be capable of becoming the basis, as well as the

motivation, for work and achievement.

3. Objectives must make possible concentration of resources and

efforts. They must winnow out the fundamentals among the goals of

a business so that the key resources of men, money, and physical

facilities can be concentrated. They must, therefore, be selective

rather than encompass everything.

4. There must be multiple objectives rather than a single

objective.

Much of today’s lively discussion of management by objectives

is concerned with the search for the “one right objective.” This

search is not only likely to be as unproductive as the quest for

the philosophers’ stone; it does harm and misdirects. To manage a

business is to balance a variety of needs and goals. And this

requires multiple objectives.

5. Objectives are needed in all areas on which the survival of

the business depends. The specific targets, the goals in any area

of objectives, depend on the strategy of the individual business.

But the areas in which objectives are needed are the same for all

businesses, for all businesses depend on the same factors for

their survival.

A business must first be able to create a customer. There is,

therefore, need for a marketing objective. Businesses must be able

to innovate or else their competitors will render them obsolete.

There is need for an innovation objective. All businesses depend

on the three factors of production of the economist, that is, on

human resources, capital resources, and physical resources. There

must be objectives for their supply, their employment, and their

development. The resources must be employed productively and their

productivity has to grow if the business is to survive. There is

need, therefore, for productivity objectives. Business exists in

society and community and, therefore, has to discharge social

responsibilities, at least to the point where it takes

responsibility for its impact upon the environment. Therefore,

objectives in respect to the social dimensions of business are

needed.

Finally, there is need for profit—otherwise none of the

objectives can be attained. They all require effort, that is,

cost. And they can be financed only out of the profits of a

business. They all entail risks; they all, therefore, require a

profit to cover the risk of potential losses. Profit is not an

objective but it is a requirement that has to be objectively

determined in respect to the individual business, its strategy,

its needs, and its risks.

Objectives, therefore, have to be set in these eight key areas:

Marketing

Innovation

Human resources

Financial resources

Physical resources

Productivity

Social responsibility

Profit requirements

Objectives are the basis for work and assignments.

They determine the structure of the business, the key

activities that must be discharged, and, above all, the allocation

of people to tasks. Objectives are the foundation for designing

both the structure of the business and the work of individual

units and individual managers.

Objectives are always needed in all eight key areas. The area

without specific objectives will be neglected. Unless we determine

what will be measured and what the yardstick of measurement in an

area will be, the area itself will not be seen.

The measurements available for the key areas of a business

enterprise are still haphazard by and large. We do not even have

adequate concepts, let alone measurements, except for market

standing. For something as central as profitability, we have only

a rubber yardstick; and we have no real tools at all to determine

how much profitability is necessary. In respect to innovation and,

even more, to productivity, we hardly know more than that

something ought to be done. In the other areas—including physical

and financial resources—we are reduced to statements of

intentions; we do not possess goals and measurements for their

attainment.

However, enough is known about each area to give a progress

report at least. Enough is known for each business to go to work

on objectives.

We know one more thing about objectives: how to use them.

If objectives are only good intentions, they are worthless.

They must be transformed into work. And work is always specific,

always has—or should have—clear, unambiguous, measurable results,

a deadline and a specific assignment of accountability.

But objectives that become a straitjacket do harm. Objectives

are always based on expectations. And expectations are, at best,

informed guesses. Objectives express an appraisal of factors that

are largely outside the business and not under its control. The

world does not stand still.

The proper way to use objectives is the way an airline uses

schedules and flight plans. The schedule provides for the 9:00

a.m. flight from Los Angeles to get to Boston by 5:00 p.m. But if

there is a blizzard in Boston that day, the plane will land in

Pittsburgh instead and wait out the storm. The flight plan

provides for flying at thirty thousand feet and for flying over

Denver and Chicago. But if the pilot encounters turbulence or

strong headwinds, he will ask flight control for permission to go

up another five thousand feet and to take the Minneapolis–Montreal

route. Yet no flight is ever operated without schedule and flight

plan. Any change is immediately fed back to produce a new schedule

and flight plan. Unless 97 percent or so of its flights proceed on

the original schedule and flight plan—or within a very limited

range of deviation from either—a well-run airline gets another

operations manager who knows his job.

Objectives are not fate; they are directions. They are not

commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future;

they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the

business for the making of the future.

Marketing Objectives

Marketing and innovation are the foundation areas in objective

setting. It is in these two areas that a business obtains its

results. It is performance and contribution in these areas for

which a customer pays.

It is somewhat misleading to speak of a marketing objective.

Marketing performance requires a number of objectives. For

example, it is geared toward:

Existing products and services in existing and present markets

Abandonment of “yesterday” in product, services, and markets

New products and services for existing markets

New markets

The distributive organization

Service standards and services performance

Credit standards and credit performance

Many books have been written about every one of these areas.

But it is almost never stressed that objectives in these areas can

be set only after two key decisions have been made: the decision

on concentration, and the decision on market standing.

Archimedes, one of the great scientists of antiquity, is

reported to have said; “Give me a place to stand on, and I can

lift the universe off its hinges.” The place to stand on is the

area of concentration. It is the area that gives a business the

leverage that lifts the universe off its hinges. The concentration

decision is, therefore, crucial; it converts, in large measure,

the definition of “what our business is” into meaningful

operational commitment.

The other major decision underlying marketing objectives is

that on market standing. One common approach is to say, We want to

be the leader. The other one is to say, We don’t care what share

of the market we have as long as sales go up. Both sound

plausible, but both are wrong.

Obviously, not everybody can be the leader. One has to decide

in which segment of the market, with what product, what services,

what values, one should be the leader. It does not do much good

for a company’s sales to go up if it loses market share, that is,

if the market expands much faster than the company’s sales do.

A company with a small share of the market will eventually

become marginal in the marketplace, and thereby exceedingly

vulnerable.

Market standing, regardless of the sales curve, is therefore

essential. The point at which the supplier becomes marginal varies

from industry to industry. But to be a marginal producer is

dangerous for long-term survival.

There is also a maximum market standing above which it may be

unwise to go—even if there were no antitrust laws. Market

domination tends to lull the leader to sleep; monopolists flounder

on their own complacency rather than on public opposition. Market

domination produces tremendous internal resistance against any

innovation and thus makes adaptation to change dangerously

difficult.

There is also well-founded resistance in the marketplace to

dependence on one dominant supplier. Whether it is the purchasing

agent of a manufacturing company, the procurement officer in the

air force, or the housewife, no one likes to be at the mercy of

the monopoly supplier.

Finally, the dominant supplier in a rapidly expanding,

especially a new, market is likely to do less well than if it

shared that market with one or two other major and competing

suppliers. This may seem paradoxical—and most businesspeople find

it difficult to accept. But the fact is that a new market,

especially a new major market, tends to expand much more rapidly

when there are several suppliers rather than only one. It may be

very flattering to a supplier’s ego to have 80 percent of a

market. But if as a result of domination by a single source, the

market does not expand as it otherwise might, the supplier’s

revenues and profits are likely to be considerably lower than they

would be if two suppliers shared a fast-expanding market. Eighty

percent of 100 is considerably less than 50 percent of 250. A new

market that has only one supplier is likely to become static at

100. It will be limited by the imagination of the one supplier who

always knows what his product or service cannot or should not be

used for. If there are several suppliers, they are likely to

uncover and promote markets and end uses the single supplier never

dreams of. And the market might grow rapidly to 250.

Du Pont seems to have grasped this. In its most successful

innovations, Du Pont retains a sole-supplier position only until

the new product has paid for the original investment. Then Du Pont

licenses the innovation and launches competitors deliberately. As

a result, a number of aggressive companies start developing new

markets and new uses for the product. Nylon would surely have

grown much more slowly without Du Pont–sponsored competition. Its

markets are still growing, but without competition it would

probably have begun to decline in the early 1950s, when newer

synthetic fibers were brought on the market by Monsanto and Union

Carbide in the United States, by Imperial Chemicals in Great

Britain, and by AKU in Holland.

The market standing to aim at is not the maximum but the

optimum.

Innovation Objective

The innovation objective is the objective through which a

company makes operational its definition of “what our business

should be.”

There are essentially three kinds of innovation in every

business: innovation in product or service; innovation in the

marketplace and consumer behavior and values; and innovation in

the various skills and activities needed to make the products and

services and to bring them to market. They might be called

respectively product innovation, social innovation, and managerial

innovation.

The problem in setting innovation objectives is measuring the

relative impact and importance of various innovations. But how are

we to determine what weighs more: a hundred minor but immediately

applicable improvements in packaging a product, or one fundamental

chemical discovery that after ten more years of hard work may

change the character of the business altogether? A department

store and a pharmaceutical company will answer this question

differently; but so may two different pharmaceutical companies.

Resources Objectives

A group of objectives deals with the resources a business needs

in order to be able to perform, with their supply, their

utilization, and their productivity.

All economic activity, economists have told us for two hundred

years, requires three kinds of resources: land, that is, products

of nature; labor, that is, human resources; and capital, that is,

the means to invest in tomorrow. The business must be able to

attract all three and to put them to productive use. A business

that cannot attract the people and the capital it needs will not

last long.

The first sign of decline of an industry is loss of appeal to

qualified, able, and ambitious people. The decline of the American

railroads, for instance, did not begin after World War II—it only

became obvious and irreversible then. The decline actually set in

around the time of World War I. Before World War I, able graduates

of American engineering schools looked for a railroad career. From

the end of World War I on—for whatever reason—the railroads no

longer appealed to young engineering graduates, or to any educated

young people.

In the two areas of people and capital supply, genuine

marketing objectives are therefore required. The key questions

are: What do our jobs have to be to attract and hold the kind of

people we need and want? What is the supply available on the job

market? And, what do we have to do to attract it? Similarly, What

does the investment in our business have to be, in the form of

bank loans, long-term debts or equity, to attract and hold the

capital we need?

Resource objectives have to be set in a double process. One

starting point is the anticipated needs of the business, which

then have to be projected on the outside, that is, on the market

for land, labor, and capital. But the other starting point is

these “markets” themselves, which then have to be projected onto

the structure, the direction, the plans of the business.

Productivity Objectives

Attracting resources and putting them to work is only the

beginning. The task of a business is to make resources productive.

Every business, therefore, needs productivity objectives with

respect to each of the three major resources, land, labor, and

capital; and with respect to overall productivity itself.

A productivity measurement is the best yardstick for comparing

managements of different units within an enterprise, and for

comparing managements of different enterprises.

All businesses have access to pretty much the same resources.

Except for the rare monopoly situation, the only thing that

differentiates one business from another in any given field is the

quality of its management on all levels. The first measurement of

this crucial factor is productivity, that is, the degree to which

resources are utilized and their yield.

The continual improvement of productivity is one of

management’s most important jobs. It is also one of the most

difficult; for productivity is a balance among a diversity of

factors, few of which are easily definable or clearly measurable.

Labor is only one of the three factors of production. And if

productivity of labor is accomplished by making the other

resources less productive, there is actually loss of productivity.

Productivity is a difficult concept, but it is central. Without

productivity objectives, a business does not have direction.

Without productivity measurements, it does not have control.

The Social Responsibilities Objectives

Only a few years ago managers as well as economists considered

the social dimension so intangible that performance objectives

could not be set. We have now learned that the intangible can

become very tangible indeed. Lessons we have learned from the rise

of consumerism, or from the attacks on industry for the

destruction of the environment, are expensive ways for us to

realize that business needs to think through its impacts and its

responsibilities and to set objectives for both.

The social dimension is a survival dimension. The enterprise

exists in a society and an economy. Within an institution one

always tends to assume that the institution exists in a vacuum.

And managers inevitably look at their business from the inside.

But the business enterprise is a creature of a society and an

economy, and society or economy can put any business out of

existence overnight. The enterprise exists on sufferance and

exists only as long as the society and the economy believe that it

does a necessary, useful, and productive job.

That such objectives need to be built into the strategy of a

business, rather than merely be statements of good intentions,

needs to be stressed here. These are objectives that are needed

not because the manager has a responsibility to society. They are

needed because the manager has a responsibility to the enterprise.

Profit as a Need and a Limitation

Only after the objectives in the above key areas have been

thought through and established can a business tackle the

question, How much profitability do we need? To attain any of the

objectives entails high risks. It requires effort, and that means

cost. Profit is, therefore, needed to pay for attainment of the

objectives of the business. Profit is a condition of survival. It

is the cost of the future, the cost of staying in business.

A business that obtains enough profit to satisfy its objectives

in the key areas is a business that has the means of survival. A

business that falls short of the profitability demands made by its

key objectives is a marginal and endangered business.

Profit planning is necessary. But it is planning for a needed

minimum profitability rather than for that meaningless shibboleth

“profit maximization.” The minimum needed may well turn out to be

a good deal higher than the profit goals of many companies, let

alone their actual profit results.

4.

WHAT THE NONPROFITS ARE

TEACHING BUSINESS

The Girl Scouts, the Red Cross, the pastoral churches—our

nonprofit organizations—are becoming America’s management leaders.

In two areas, strategy and the effectiveness of the board, they

are practicing what most American businesses only preach. And in

the most crucial area—the motivation and productivity of knowledge

workers—they are truly pioneers, working out the policies and

practices that business will have to learn tomorrow.

Few people are aware that the nonprofit sector is by far

America’s largest employer. Every other adult—a total of 80

million–plus people—works as a volunteer, giving on average nearly

five hours each week to one or several nonprofit organizations.

This is equal to 10 million full-time jobs. Were volunteers paid,

their wages, even at minimum rate, would amount to some $150

billion, or 5 percent of GNP. And volunteer work is changing fast.

To be sure, what many do requires little skill or judgment:

collecting in the neighborhood for the Community Chest one

Saturday afternoon a year, chaperoning youngsters selling Girl

Scout cookies door to door, driving old people to the doctor. But

more and more volunteers are becoming “unpaid staff,” taking over

the professional and managerial tasks in their organizations.

Not all nonprofits have been doing well, of course. A good many

community hospitals are in dire straits. Traditional churches and

synagogues of all persuasions—liberal, conservative, evangelical,

fundamentalist—are still steadily losing members. Indeed, the

sector overall has not expanded in the last ten to fifteen years,

either in terms of the money it raises (when adjusted for

inflation) or in the number of volunteers. Yet in its

productivity, in the scope of its work, and in its contribution to

American society, the nonprofit sector has grown tremendously in

the last two decades.

The Salvation Army is an example. People convicted to their

first prison term in Florida, mostly very poor black or Hispanic

youths, are now paroled into the Salvation Army’s custody—about

twenty-five thousand each year. Statistics show that if these

young men and women go to jail, the majority will become habitual

criminals. But the Salvation Army has been able to rehabilitate 80

percent of them through a strict work program run largely by

volunteers. And the program costs a fraction of what it would to

keep the offenders behind bars.

A Commitment to Management

Underlying this program and many other effective nonprofit

endeavors is a commitment to management. Twenty years ago

management was a dirty word for those involved in nonprofit

organizations. It meant business, and nonprofits prided themselves

on being free of the taint of commercialism and above such sordid

considerations as the bottom line. Now most of them have learned

that nonprofits need management even more than business does,

precisely because they lack the discipline of the bottom line. The

nonprofits are, of course, still dedicated to “doing good.” But

they also realize that good intentions are no substitute for

organization and leadership, for accountability, performance, and

results. Those things require management and that, in turn, begins

with the organization’s mission.

Starting with the mission and its requirements may be the first

lesson business can learn from successful nonprofits. It focuses

the organization on action. It defines the specific strategies

needed to attain the crucial goals. It creates a disciplined

organization. It alone can prevent the most common degenerative

disease of organizations, especially large ones: fragmenting their

always limited resources on things that are “interesting” or “look

profitable” rather than concentrating them on a very small number

of productive efforts.

The best nonprofits devote a great deal of thought to defining

their organization’s mission. They avoid sweeping statements full

of good intentions and focus, instead, on objectives that have

clear-cut implications for the work their members—staff and

volunteers—perform. The Salvation Army’s goal, for example, is to

turn society’s rejects—alcoholics, criminals, derelicts—into

citizens. The Girl Scouts help youngsters become confident,

capable young women who respect themselves and other people. The

Nature Conservancy preserves the diversity of nature’s fauna and

flora. Nonprofits also start with the environment, the community,

the “customers” to be; they do not, as American businesses tend to

do, start with the inside, that is, with the organization or with

financial returns.

Willowcreek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois,

outside Chicago, has become the nation’s largest church—some

thirteen thousand parishioners. Yet it is barely fifteen years

old. Bill Hybels, in his early twenties when he founded the

church, chose the community because it had relatively few

churchgoers, though the population was growing fast and churches

were plentiful. He went from door to door asking, “Why don’t you

go to church?” Then he designed a church to answer the potential

customers’ needs: for instance, it offers full services on

Wednesday evenings because many working parents need Sunday to

spend with their children. Moreover, Hybels continues to listen

and react. The pastor’s sermon is taped while it is being

delivered and instantly reproduced so that parishioners can pick

up a cassette when they leave the building because he was told

again and again, “I need to listen when I drive home or drive to

work so that I can build the message into my life.” But he was

also told, “The sermon always tells me to change my life but never

how to do it.” So now every one of Hybels’s sermons ends with

specific action recommendations.

A well-defined mission serves as a constant reminder of the

need to look outside the organization not only for “customers” but

also for measures of success. The temptation to content oneself

with the “goodness of our cause”—and thus to substitute good

intentions for results—always exists in nonprofit organizations.

It is precisely because of this that the successful nonprofits

have learned to define clearly what changes outside the

organization constitute “results” and to focus on them.

The experience of one large Catholic hospital chain in the

Southwest shows how productive a clear sense of mission and a

focus on results can be. Despite the sharp cuts in Medicare

payments and hospital stays during the past eight years, this

chain has increased revenues by 15 percent (thereby managing to

break even) while greatly expanding its services and raising both

patient-care and medical standards. It has done so because the nun

who is the CEO understood that she and her staff are in the

business of delivering health care (especially to the poor), not

running hospitals.

As a result, when health-care delivery began moving out of

hospitals for medical rather than economic reasons about ten years

ago, the chain promoted the trend instead of fighting it. It

founded ambulatory surgery centers, rehabilitation centers, X-ray

and lab networks, HMOs, and so on. The chain’s motto was, If it’s

in the patient’s interest, we have to promote it; it’s then our

job to make it pay. Paradoxically, the policy has filled the

chain’s hospitals; the freestanding facilities are so popular they

generate a steady stream of referrals.

This is, of course, not so different from the marketing

strategy of successful Japanese companies. But it is very

different indeed from the way most Western businesses think and

operate. And the difference is that the Catholic nuns—and the

Japanese—start with the mission rather than with their own

rewards, and with what they have to make happen outside

themselves, in the marketplace, to deserve a reward.

Finally, a clearly defined mission will foster innovative ideas

and help others understand why they need to be implemented—however

much they fly in the face of tradition. To illustrate, consider

the Daisy Scouts, a program for five-year-olds that the Girl

Scouts initiated a few years back. For seventy-five years, first

grade had been the minimum age for entry into a Brownie troop, and

many Girl Scout councils wanted to keep it that way. Others,

however, looked at demographics and saw the growing number of

working women with “latchkey” kids. They also looked at the

children and realized that they were far more sophisticated than

their predecessors a generation ago (largely thanks to TV).

Today the Daisy Scouts are one hundred thousand strong and

growing fast. It is by far the most successful of the many

programs for kindergartners that have been started these last

twenty years, and far more successful than any of the very

expensive government programs. Moreover, it is so far the only

program that has seen these critical demographic changes and

children’s exposure to long hours of TV viewing as an opportunity.

Effective Use of the Board

Many nonprofits now have what is still the exception in

business—a functioning board. They also have something even rarer:

a CEO who is clearly accountable to the board and whose

performance is reviewed annually by a board committee. And they

have what is rarer still: a board whose performance is reviewed

annually against preset performance objectives. Effective use of

the board is thus a second area in which business can learn from

the nonprofit sector.

In U.S. law, the board of directors is still considered the

“managing” organ of the corporation. Management authors and

scholars agree that strong boards are essential and have been

writing to that effect for more than twenty years. Nevertheless,

the top managements of our large companies have been whittling

away at the directors’ role, power, and independence for more than

half a century. In every single business failure of a large

company in the last few decades, the board was the last to realize

that things were going wrong. To find a truly effective board, you

are much better advised to look in the nonprofit sector than in

our public corporations.

In part, this difference is a product of history.

Traditionally, the board has run the shop in nonprofit

organizations—or tried to. In fact, it is only because nonprofits

have grown too big and complex to be run by part-time outsiders,

meeting for three hours a month, that so many have shifted to

professional management. The American Red Cross is probably the

largest nongovernmental agency in the world and certainly one of

the most complex. It is responsible for worldwide disaster relief;

it runs thousands of blood banks as well as the bone and skin

banks in hospitals; it conducts training in cardiac and

respiratory rescue nationwide; and it gives first-aid courses in

thousands of schools. Yet it did not have a paid chief executive

until 1950, and its first professional CEO came only with the

Reagan era.

But however common professional management becomes—and

professional CEOs are now found in most nonprofits and all the

bigger ones—nonprofit boards cannot, as a rule, be rendered

impotent the way so many business boards have been. No matter how

much nonprofit CEOs would welcome it—and quite a few surely

would—nonprofit boards cannot become their rubber stamp. Money is

one reason. Few directors in publicly held corporations are

substantial shareholders, whereas directors on nonprofit boards

very often contribute large sums themselves, and are expected to

bring in donors as well. But also, nonprofit directors tend to

have a personal commitment to the organization’s cause. Few people

sit on a church vestry or on a school board unless they deeply

care about religion or education. Moreover, nonprofit board

members typically have served as volunteers themselves for a good

many years and are deeply knowledgeable about the organization,

unlike outside directors in a business.

Precisely because the nonprofit board is so committed and

active, its relationship with the CEO tends to be highly

contentious and full of potential for friction. Nonprofit CEOs

complain that their board “meddles.” The directors, in turn,

complain that management “usurps” the board’s function. This has

forced an increasing number of nonprofits to realize that neither

board nor CEO is “the boss.” They are colleagues, working for the

same goal but each having a different task. And they have learned

that it is the CEO’s responsibility to define the tasks of each,

the board’s and his or her own.

The key to making a board effective, as this example suggests,

is not to talk about its function but to organize its work. More

and more nonprofits are doing just that, among them half a dozen

fair-sized liberal arts colleges, a leading theological seminary,

and some large research hospitals and museums.

The weakening of the large corporation’s board would, many of

us predicted, weaken management rather than strengthen it. It

would diffuse management’s accountability for performance and

results; and indeed, it is the rare big-company board that reviews

the CEO’s performance against preset business objectives.

Weakening the board would also, we predicted, deprive top

management of effective and credible support if it were attacked.

These predictions have been borne out amply in the recent rash of

hostile takeovers.

To restore management’s ability to manage, we will have to make

boards effective again—and that should be considered a

responsibility of the CEO. A few first steps have been taken. The

audit committee in most companies now has a real rather than a

make-believe job responsibility. A few companies—though so far

almost no large ones—have a small board committee on succession

and executive development, which regularly meets with senior

executives to discuss their performance and their plans. But I

know of no company so far where there are work plans for the board

and any kind of review of the board’s performance. And few do what

the larger nonprofits now do routinely: put a new board member

through systematic training.

To Offer Meaningful Achievement

Nonprofits used to say, We don’t pay volunteers so we cannot

make demands upon them. Now they are more likely to say,

Volunteers must get far greater satisfaction from their

accomplishments and make a greater contribution precisely because

they do not get a paycheck. The steady transformation of the

volunteer from well-meaning amateur to trained, professional,

unpaid staff member is the most significant development in the

nonprofit sector—as well as the one with the farthest-reaching

implications for tomorrow’s business.

A midwestern Catholic diocese may have come furthest in this

process. It now has fewer than half the priests and nuns it had

only fifteen years ago. Yet it has greatly expanded its

activities—in some cases, such as providing help for the homeless

and for drug abusers, more than doubling them. It still has many

traditional volunteers like the Altar Guild members who arrange

flowers. But now it is also being served by some two thousand

part-time unpaid staff who run the Catholic charities, perform

administrative jobs in parochial schools, and organize youth

activities, college Newman Clubs, and even some retreats.

A similar change has taken place at the First Baptist Church in

Richmond, Virginia, one of the largest and oldest churches in the

Southern Baptist Convention. When Dr. Peter James Flamming took

over, the church had been going downhill for many years, as is

typical of old, inner-city churches. Today it again has four

thousand communicants and runs a dozen community outreach programs

as well as a full complement of in-church ministries. The church

has only nine paid full-time employees. But of its four thousand

communicants, one thousand serve as unpaid staff.

This development is by no means confined to religious

organizations. The American Heart Association has chapters in

every city of any size throughout the country. Yet its paid staff

is limited to those at national headquarters, with just a few

traveling troubleshooters serving the field. Volunteers manage and

staff the chapters, with full responsibility for community health

education as well as fund-raising.

These changes are, in part, a response to need. With close to

half the adult population already serving as volunteers, their

overall number is unlikely to grow. And with money always in short

supply, the nonprofits cannot add paid staff. If they want to add

to their activities—and needs are growing—they have to make

volunteers more productive, have to give them more work and more

responsibility. But the major impetus for the change in the

volunteer’s role has come from the volunteers themselves.

More and more volunteers are educated people in managerial or

professional jobs—some preretirement men and women in their

fifties, even more baby boomers who are reaching their

mid-thirties or forties. These people are not satisfied with being

helpers. They are knowledge workers in the jobs in which they earn

their living, and they want to be knowledge workers in the jobs in

which they contribute to society—that is, their volunteer work. If

nonprofit organizations want to attract and hold them, they have

to put their competence and knowledge to work. They have to offer

meaningful achievement.

Training, Training, and Training

Many nonprofits systematically recruit for such people.

Seasoned volunteers are assigned to scan the newcomers—the new

member in a church or synagogue, the neighbor who collects for the

Red Cross—to find those with leadership talent and persuade them

to try themselves in more demanding assignments. Then senior staff

(either a full-timer on the payroll or a seasoned volunteer)

interviews the newcomers to assess their strengths and place them

accordingly. Volunteers may also be assigned both a mentor and a

supervisor with whom they work out their performance goals. These

advisers are two different people, as a rule, and both,

ordinarily, volunteers themselves.

The Girl Scouts, which employs 730,000 volunteers and only

6,000 paid staff for 3.5 million girl members, works this way. A

volunteer typically starts by driving youngsters once a week to a

meeting. Then a more seasoned volunteer draws her into other

work—accompanying Girl Scouts selling cookies door-to-door,

assisting a Brownie leader on a camping trip. Out of this

step-by-step process evolve the volunteer boards of the local

councils and, eventually, the Girl Scouts governing organ, the

National Board. Each step, even the very first, has its own

compulsory training program, usually conducted by a woman who is

herself a volunteer. Each step has specific performance standards

and performance goals.

What do these unpaid staff people themselves demand? What makes

them stay? And, of course, they can leave at any time. Their first

and most important demand is that the nonprofit have a clear

mission, one that drives everything the organization does. A

senior vice president in a large regional bank has two small

children. Yet she just took over as chair of the state chapter of

Nature Conservancy, which finds, buys, and manages endangered

natural ecologies. “I love my job,” she said, when I asked her why

she took on such heavy additional work, “and of course the bank

has a creed. But it doesn’t really know what it contributes. At

Nature Conservancy, I know what I am here for.”

The second thing this new breed requires, indeed demands, is

training, training, and more training. And, in turn, the most

effective way to motivate and hold veterans is to recognize their

expertise and use them to train newcomers. Then these knowledge

workers demand responsibility—above all, for thinking through and

setting their own performance goals. They expect to be consulted

and to participate in making decisions that affect their work and

the work of the organization as a whole. And they expect

opportunities for advancement, that is, a chance to take on more

demanding assignments and more responsibility as their performance

warrants. That is why a good many nonprofits have developed career

ladders for their volunteers.

Supporting all this activity is accountability. Many of today’s

knowledge-worker volunteers insist on having their performance

reviewed against preset objectives at least once a year. And

increasingly, they expect their organizations to remove

nonperformers by moving them to other assignments that better fit

their capacities or by counseling them to leave. “It’s worse than

the Marine Corps boot camp,” says the priest in charge of

volunteers in the midwestern diocese, “but we have four hundred

people on the waiting list.” One large and growing midwestern art

museum requires of its volunteers—board members, fund-raisers,

docents, and the people who edit the museum’s newsletter—that they

set their goals each year, appraise themselves against those

goals, and resign when they fail to meet their goals two years in

a row. So does a fair-sized Jewish organization working on college

campuses.

These volunteer professionals are still a minority, but a

significant one—perhaps one-tenth of the total volunteer

population. And they are growing in numbers and, more important,

in their impact on the nonprofit sector. Increasingly, nonprofits

say what the minister in a large pastoral church says: “There is

no laity in this church; there are only pastors, a few paid, most

unpaid.”

A Warning to Business

This move from nonprofit volunteer to nonpaid professional may

be the most important development in American society today. We

hear a great deal about the decay and dissolution of family and

community and about the loss of values. And, of course, there is

reason for concern. But the nonprofits are generating a powerful

countercurrent. They are forging new bonds of community, a new

commitment to active citizenship, to social responsibility, to

values. And surely what the nonprofit contributes to the volunteer

is as important as what the volunteer contributes to the

nonprofit. Indeed, it may be fully as important as the service,

whether religious, educational, or welfare related, that the

nonprofit provides in the community.

This development also carries a clear lesson for business.

Managing the knowledge worker for productivity is the next great

challenge for American management. The nonprofits are showing us

how to do that. It requires a clear mission, careful placement and

continual learning and teaching, management by objectives and

self-control, high demands but corresponding responsibility, and

accountability for performance and results.

There is also, however, a clear warning to American business in

this transformation of volunteer work. The students in the program

for senior and middle-level executives in which I teach work in a

wide diversity of businesses: banks and insurance companies, large

retail chains, aerospace and computer companies, real estate

developers, and many others. But most of them also serve as

volunteers in nonprofits—in a church, on the board of the college

they graduated from, as scout leaders, with the YMCA or the

Community Chest or the local symphony orchestra. When I ask them

why they do it, far too many give the same answer: In my paying

job there isn’t much challenge, not enough opportunity for

achievement, not enough responsibility; and there is no mission,

there is only expediency.

5.

SOCIAL IMPACTS

AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS

Social responsibilities—whether of a business, a hospital, or a

university—may arise in two areas. They may emerge out of the

social impacts of the institution. Or they arise as problems of

the society itself. Both are of concern to management because the

institution that managers manage lives of necessity in society and

community. But otherwise, the two areas are different. The first

deals with what an institution does to society. The second is

concerned with what an institution can do for society.

The modern organization exists to provide a specific service to

society. It therefore has to be in society. It has to be in a

community, has to be a neighbor, has to do its work within a

social setting. But also, it has to employ people to do its work.

Its social impacts inevitably go beyond the specific contribution

it exists to make.

The purpose of the hospital is not to employ nurses and cooks.

It is patient care. But to accomplish this purpose, nurses and

cooks are needed. And in no time at all they form a work community

with its own community tasks and community problems.

The purpose of a ferroalloy plant is not to make noise or to

release noxious fumes. It is to make high-performance metals that

serve the customer. But in order to do this, it produces noise,

creates heat, and releases fumes.

These impacts are incidental to the purpose of the

organization. But in large measure they are inescapable

by-products.

Social problems, by contrast, are dysfunctions of society

rather than impacts of the organization and its activities.

Since the institution can exist only within the social

environment, is indeed an organ of society, such social problems

affect the institution. They are of concern to it even if the

community itself sees no problem and resists any attempt to tackle

it.

A healthy business, a healthy university, a healthy hospital

cannot exist in a sick society. Management has a self-interest in

a healthy society, even though the cause of society’s sickness is

none of management’s making.

Responsibility for Impacts

One is responsible for one’s impacts, whether they are intended

or not. This is the first rule. There is no doubt regarding

management’s responsibility for the social impacts of its

organization. They are management’s business.

It is not enough to say, But the public doesn’t object. It is,

above all, not enough to say that any action to come to grips with

a particular problem is going to be “unpopular,” is going to be

“resented” by one’s colleagues and one’s associates, and is not

required. Sooner or later society will come to regard any such

impact as an attack on its integrity and will exact a high price

from those who have not responsibly worked on eliminating the

impact or on finding a solution to the problem.

Here is one example.

In the late 1940s and early ‘50s, one American automobile

company tried to make the American public safety-conscious. Ford

introduced cars with seat belts. But sales dropped

catastrophically. The company had to withdraw the cars with seat

belts and abandoned the whole idea. When, fifteen years later, the

American driving public became safety-conscious, the car

manufacturers were sharply attacked for their “total lack of

concern with safety” and for being “merchants of death.” And the

resulting regulations were written as much to punish the companies

as to protect the public.

The first job of management is, therefore, to identify and to

anticipate impacts—coldly and realistically. The question is not,

Is what we do right? It is, Is what we do what society and the

customer pay us for?

How to Deal with Impacts

Identifying incidental impacts of an institution is the first

step. But how does management deal with them? The objective is

clear: impacts on society and economy, community, and individual

that are not in themselves the purpose and mission of the

institution should be kept to a minimum and should preferably be

eliminated altogether. The fewer such impacts the better, whether

the impact is within the institution, on the social environment,

or on the physical environment.

Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity

that causes it, that is therefore the best—indeed the only truly

good—solution.

In most cases the activity cannot, however, be eliminated.

Hence, there is need for systematic work at eliminating the

impact—or at least at minimizing it—while maintaining the

underlying activity itself. The ideal approach is to make the

elimination of impacts into a profitable business opportunity. One

example is the way Dow Chemical, one of the leading U.S. chemical

companies, has for almost twenty years tackled air and water

pollution. Dow decided, shortly after World War II, that air and

water pollution was an undesirable impact that had to be

eliminated. Long before the public outcry about the environment,

Dow adopted a zero-pollution policy for its plants. It then set

about systematically to develop the polluting substances it

removes from smokestack gases and watery effluents into salable

products and to create uses and markets for them.

Another example is the Du Pont Industrial Toxicity Laboratory.

Du Pont, in the 1920s, became aware of the toxic side effects of

many of its industrial products and set up a laboratory to test

for toxicity and to develop processes to eliminate the poisons. Du

Pont started out to eliminate an impact that at that time every

other chemical manufacturer took for granted. But then Du Pont

decided to develop toxicity control of industrial products into a

separate business. The Industrial Toxicity Laboratory works not

only for Du Pont but for a wide variety of customers for whom it

develops nonpoisonous compounds, whose products it tests for

toxicity, and so on. Again, an impact has been eliminated by

making it into a business opportunity.

To make elimination of an impact into a business opportunity

should always be attempted. But it cannot be done in many cases.

More often eliminating an impact means increasing the costs. What

was an “externality” for which the general public paid becomes

business cost. It therefore becomes a competitive disadvantage

unless everybody in the industry accepts the same rule. And this,

in most cases, can be done only by regulation—that means by some

form of public action.

Whenever an impact cannot be eliminated without an increase in

cost, it becomes incumbent upon management to think ahead and work

out the regulation that is most likely to solve the problem at the

minimum cost and with the greatest benefit to public and business

alike. And it is then management’s job to work at getting the

right regulation enacted.

Management—and not only business management—has shunned this

responsibility. The traditional attitude has always been that “no

regulation is the best regulation.” But this applies only when an

impact can be made into a business opportunity. Where elimination

of an impact requires a restriction, regulation is in the interest

of business, and especially in the interest of responsible

business. Otherwise, it will be penalized as “irresponsible,”

while the unscrupulous, the greedy, and the stupid cash in.

And to expect that there will be no regulation is willful

blindness.

The fact that the public today sees no issue is not relevant.

Indeed, it is not even relevant that the public today—as it did in

the Ford example above—resists actively any attempts on the part

of farsighted business leaders to prevent a crisis. In the end,

there is the scandal.

Any solution to an impact problem requires trade-offs. Beyond a

certain level elimination of an impact costs more in money or in

energy, in resources or in lives, than the attainable benefit. A

decision has to be made on the optimal balance between costs and

benefits. This is something people in an industry understand, as a

rule. But no one outside does—and so the outsider’s solution tends

to ignore the trade-off problem altogether.

Responsibility for social impacts is a management

responsibility—not because it is a social responsibility, but

because it is a business responsibility. The ideal is to make

elimination of such an impact into a business opportunity. But

wherever that cannot be done, the design of the appropriate

regulation with the optimal trade-off balance—and public

discussion of the problem and promotion of the best regulatory

solution—is management’s job.

Social Problems as Business Opportunities

Social problems are dysfunctions of society and—at least

potentially—degenerative diseases of the body politic. They are

ills. But for the management of institutions, and, above all, for

business management, they represent challenges. They are major

sources of opportunity. For it is the function of business—and to

a lesser degree of the other main institutions—to satisfy a social

need and at the same time serve themselves by making resolution of

a social problem into a business opportunity.

It is the job of business to convert change into innovation,

that is, into new business. And it is a poor businessman who

thinks that innovation refers to technology alone. Social change

and social innovation have throughout business history been at

least as important as technology. After all, the major industries

of the nineteenth century were, to a very large extent, the result

of converting the new social environment—the industrial city—into

a business opportunity and into a business market. This underlay

the rise of lighting, first by gas and then by electricity, of the

streetcar and the interurban trolley, of telephone, newspaper, and

department store—to name only a few.

The most significant opportunities for converting social

problems into business opportunities may therefore not lie in new

technologies, new products, and new services. They may lie in

solving the social problem, that is, in social innovation, which

then directly and indirectly benefits and strengthens the company

or the industry.

The experience of some of the most successful businesses is

largely the result of such social innovation.

The years immediately prior to World War I were years of great

labor unrest in the United States, growing labor bitterness, and

high unemployment. Hourly wages for skilled men ran as low as

fifteen cents in many cases. It was against this background that

the Ford Motor Company, in the closing days of 1913, announced

that it would pay a guaranteed five-dollar-a-day wage to every one

of its workers—two to three times what was then standard. James

Couzens, the company’s general manager, who had forced this

decision on his reluctant partner, Henry Ford, knew perfectly well

that his company’s wage bill would almost triple overnight. But he

became convinced that the workmen’s sufferings were so great that

only radical and highly visible action could have an effect.

Couzens also expected that Ford’s actual labor cost, despite the

tripling of the wage rate, would go down—and events soon proved

him right. Before Ford changed the whole labor economy of the

United States with one announcement, labor turnover at the Ford

Motor Company had been so high that, in 1912, sixty thousand men

had to be hired to retain ten thousand workers. With the new wage,

turnover almost disappeared. The resulting savings were so great

that despite sharply rising costs for all materials in the next

few years, Ford could produce and sell its Model T at a lower

price and yet make a larger profit per car. It was the saving in

labor cost produced by a drastically higher wage that gave Ford

market domination. At the same time, Ford’s action transformed

American industrial society. It established the American

workingman as fundamentally middle class.

Social problems that management action converts into

opportunities soon cease to be problems. The others, however, are

likely to become “chronic complaints,” if not “degenerative

diseases.”

Not every social problem can be resolved by making it into an

opportunity for contribution and performance. Indeed, the most

serious of such problems tend to defy this approach.

What then is the social responsibility of management for these

social problems that become chronic complaints or degenerative

diseases?

They are management’s problems. The health of the enterprise is

management’s responsibility. A healthy business and a sick society

are hardly compatible. Healthy businesses require a healthy, or at

least a functioning, society. The health of the community is a

prerequisite for successful and growing business.

And it is foolish to hope that these problems will disappear if

only one looks the other way. Problems go away because someone

does something about them.

To what extent should business—or any other of the

special-purpose institutions of our society—be expected to tackle

such a problem that did not arise out of an impact of theirs and

that cannot be converted into an opportunity for performance of

the institution’s purpose and mission? To what extent should these

institutions, business, university, or hospital, even be permitted

to take responsibility?

Today’s rhetoric tends to ignore that question. “Here is,” John

Lindsay, former mayor of New York, said, “the black ghetto. No one

knows what to do with it. Whatever government, social workers, or

community action try, things seem only to get worse. Therefore,

big business better take responsibility.”

That Mayor Lindsay frantically looks for someone to take over

is understandable; and the problem that is defeating him is indeed

desperate and a major threat to his city, to American society, and

to the Western world altogether. But is it enough to make the

problem of the black ghetto the social responsibility of

management? Or are there limits to social responsibility? And what

are they?

The Limits of Social Responsibility

The manager is a servant. His or her master is the institution

being managed and the first responsibility must therefore be to

it. The manager’s first task is to make the institution, whether

business, hospital, school, or university, perform the function

and make the contribution for the sake of which it exists. The

manager who uses a position at the head of a major institution to

become a public figure and to take leadership with respect to

social problems, while the company or the university erodes

through neglect, is not a statesman, but is irresponsible and

false to his trust.

The institution’s performance of its specific mission is also

society’s first need and interest. Society does not stand to gain

but to lose if the performance capacity of the institution in its

own specific task is diminished or impaired. Performance of its

function is the institution’s first social responsibility. Unless

it discharges its performance responsibly, it cannot discharge

anything else. A bankrupt business is not a desirable employer and

is unlikely to be a good neighbor in a community. Nor will it

create the capital for tomorrow’s jobs and the opportunities for

tomorrow’s workers. A university that fails to prepare tomorrow’s

leaders and professionals is not socially responsible, no matter

how many “good works” it engages in.

Above all, management needs to know the minimum profitability

required by the risks of the business and by its commitments to

the future. It needs this knowledge for its own decisions. But it

needs it just as much to explain its decisions to others—the

politicians, the press, the public. As long as managements remain

the prisoners of their own ignorance of the objective need for,

and function of, profit—i.e., as long as they think and argue in

terms of the “profit motive”—they will be able neither to make

rational decisions with respect to social responsibilities, nor to

explain these decisions to others inside and outside the business.

Whenever a business has disregarded the limitation of economic

performance and has assumed social responsibilities that it could

not support economically, it has soon gotten into trouble.

The same limitation on social responsibility applies to

noneconomic institutions. There, too, the manager is duty-bound to

preserve the performance capacity of the institution in his care.

To jeopardize it, no matter how noble the motive, is

irresponsibility. These institutions, too, are capital assets of

society on the performance of which society depends.

This, to be sure, is a very unpopular position to take. It is

much more popular to be “progressive.” But managers, and

especially managers of key institutions of society, are not being

paid to be heroes to the popular press. They are being paid for

performance and responsibility.

To take on tasks for which one lacks competence is

irresponsible behavior. It is also cruel. It raises expectations

that will then be disappointed.

An institution, and especially a business enterprise, has to

acquire whatever competence is needed to take responsibility for

its impacts. But in areas of social responsibility other than

impacts, right and duty to act are limited by competence.

In particular an institution better refrain from tackling tasks

that do not fit into its value system. Skills and knowledge are

fairly easily acquired. But one cannot easily change personality.

No one is likely to do well in areas that he does not respect. If

a business or any other institution tackles such an area because

there is a social need, it is unlikely to put its good people on

the task and to support them adequately. It is unlikely to

understand what the task involves. It is almost certain to do the

wrong things. As a result, it will do damage rather than good.

Management therefore needs to know at the very least what it

and its institution are truly incompetent for. Business, as a

rule, will be in this position of absolute incompetence in an

“intangible” area. The strength of business is accountability and

measurability. It is the discipline of market test, productivity

measurements, and profitability requirement. Where these are

lacking, businesses are essentially out of their depth. They are

also out of fundamental sympathy, that is, outside their own value

systems. Where the criteria of performance are intangible, such as

“political” opinions and emotions, community approval or

disapproval, mobilization of community energies and structuring of

power relations, business is unlikely to feel comfortable. It is

unlikely to have respect for the values that matter. It is,

therefore, most unlikely to have competence.

In such areas it is, however, often possible to define goals

clearly and measurably for specific partial tasks. It is often

possible to convert parts of a problem that by itself lies outside

the competence of business into work that fits the competence and

value system of the business enterprise.

No one in America has done very well in training hard-core

unemployable black teenagers for work and jobs. But business has

done far less badly than any other institution: schools,

government programs, community agencies. This task can be

identified. It can be defined. Goals can be set. And performance

can be measured. And then business can perform.

The Limits of Authority

The most important limitation on social responsibility is the

limitation of authority. The constitutional lawyer knows that

there is no such word as “responsibility” in the political

dictionary. The appropriate term is “responsibility and

authority.” Whoever claims authority thereby assumes

responsibility. But whoever assumes responsibility thereby claims

authority. The two are but different sides of the same coin. To

assume social responsibility therefore always means to claim

authority.

Again, the question of authority as a limit on social

responsibility does not arise in connection with the impacts of an

institution. For the impact is the result of an exercise of

authority, even though purely incidental and unintended. And then

responsibility follows.

But where business or any other institution of our society of

organizations is asked to assume social responsibility for one of

the problems or ills of society and community, management needs to

think through whether the authority implied in the responsibility

is legitimate. Otherwise it is usurpation and irresponsible.

Every time the demand is made that business take responsibility

for this or that, one should ask, Does business have the authority

and should it have it? If business does not have and should not

have authority—and in a great many areas it should not have

it—then responsibility on the part of business should be treated

with grave suspicion. It is not responsibility; it is lust for

power.

Ralph Nader, the American consumerist, sincerely considers

himself a foe of big business and is accepted as such by business

and by the general public. Insofar as Nader demands that business

take responsibility for product quality and product safety, he is

surely concerned with legitimate business responsibility, i.e.,

with responsibility for performance and contribution.

But Ralph Nader demands, above all, that big business assume

responsibility in a multitude of areas beyond products and

services. This, if acceded to, can lead only to the emergence of

the managements of the big corporations as the ultimate power in a

vast number of areas that are properly some other institution’s

field.

And this is, indeed, the position to which Nader—and other

advocates of unlimited social responsibility—are moving rapidly.

One of the Nader task forces published a critique of the Du Pont

Company and its role in the small state of Delaware, where Du Pont

has its headquarters and is a major employer. The report did not

even discuss economic performance; it dismissed as irrelevant that

Du Pont, in a period of general inflation, consistently lowered

the prices for its products, which are, in many cases, basic

materials for the American economy. Instead it sharply criticized

Du Pont for not using its economic power to force the citizens of

the state to attack a number of social problems, from racial

discrimination to health care to public schools. Du Pont, for not

taking responsibility for Delaware society, Delaware politics, and

Delaware law, was called grossly remiss in its social

responsibility.

One of the ironies of this story is that the traditional

liberal or left-wing criticism of the Du Pont Company for many

years has been the exact opposite, i.e., that Du Pont, by its very

prominence in a small state, “interferes in and dominates”

Delaware and exercises “illegitimate authority.”

Management must resist responsibility for a social problem that

would compromise or impair the performance capacity of its

business (or its university or its hospital). It must resist when

the demand goes beyond the institution’s competence. It must

resist when responsibility would, in fact, be illegitimate

authority. But then, if the problem is a real one, it better think

through and offer an alternative approach. If the problem is

serious, something will ultimately have to be done about it.

Managements of all major institutions, including business

enterprise, need, too, to concern themselves with serious ills of

society. If at all possible, they should convert the solution of

these problems into an opportunity for performance and

contribution. At the least they should think through what the

problem is and how it might be tackled. They cannot escape

concern; for this society of organizations has no one else to be

concerned about real problems. In this society, managers of

institutions are the leadership group.

But we also know that a developed society needs performing

institutions with their own autonomous management. It cannot

function as a totalitarian society. Indeed, what characterizes a

developed society—and indeed makes it a developed one—is that most

of its social tasks are carried out in and through organized

institutions, each with its own autonomous management. These

organizations, including most of the agencies of our government,

are special-purpose institutions. They are organs of our society

for specific performance in a specific area. The greatest

contribution they can make, their greatest social responsibility,

is performance of their function. The greatest social

irresponsibility is to impair the performance capacity of these

institutions by tackling tasks beyond their competence or by

usurpation of authority in the name of social responsibility.

The Ethics of Responsibility

Countless sermons have been preached and printed on the ethics

of business or the ethics of the businessman. Most have nothing to

do with business and little to do with ethics.

One main topic is plain, everyday honesty. Businessmen, we are

told solemnly, should not cheat, steal, lie, bribe, or take

bribes. But nor should anyone else. Men and women do not acquire

exemption from ordinary rules of personal behavior because of

their work or job. Nor, however, do they cease to be human beings

when appointed vice president, city manager, or college dean. And

there has always been a number of people who cheat, steal, lie,

bribe, or take bribes. The problem is one of moral values and

moral education, of the individual, of the family, of the school.

But neither is there a separate ethics of business, nor is one

needed.

All that is needed is to mete out stiff punishments to

those—whether business executives or others—who yield to

temptation.

The other common theme in the discussion of ethics in business

has nothing to do with ethics. It would indeed be nice to have

fastidious leaders. Alas, fastidiousness has never been prevalent

among leadership groups, whether kings and counts, priests, or

generals, or even “intellectuals” such as the painters and

humanists of the Renaissance, or the “literati” of the Chinese

tradition. All a fastidious man can do is withdraw personally from

activities that violate his self-respect and his sense of taste.

Lately these old sermon topics have been joined, especially in

the United States, by a third one: managers, we are being told,

have an “ethical responsibility” to take an active and

constructive role in their community, to serve community causes,

give of their time to community activities, and so on.

Such activities should, however, never be forced on them, nor

should managers be appraised, rewarded, or promoted according to

their participation in voluntary activities. Ordering or

pressuring managers into such work is abuse of organizational

power and illegitimate.

But, while desirable, community participation of managers has

nothing to do with ethics, and not much to do with responsibility.

It is the contribution of an individual in his or her capacity as

a neighbor and citizen. And it is something that lies outside the

manager’s job and outside managerial responsibility.

A problem of ethics that is peculiar to the manager arises from

the managers of institutions being collectively the leadership

groups of the society of organizations. But individually a manager

is just another fellow employee.

It is therefore inappropriate to speak of managers as leaders.

They are “members of the leadership group.” The group, however,

does occupy a position of visibility, of prominence, and of

authority. It therefore has responsibility.

But what are the responsibilities, what are the ethics of the

individual manager, as a member of the leadership group?

Essentially being a member of a leadership group is what

traditionally has been meant by the term “professional.”

Membership in such a group confers status, position, prominence,

and authority. It also confers duties. To expect every manager to

be a leader is futile. There are, in a developed society,

thousands, if not millions, of managers—and leadership is always

the rare exception and confined to a very few individuals. But as

a member of a leadership group a manager stands under the demands

of professional ethics—the demands of an ethic of responsibility.

Not Knowingly to Do Harm

The first responsibility of a professional was spelled out

clearly, twenty-five hundred years ago, in the Hipprocratic oath

of the Greek physician: Primum non nocere—“Above all, not

knowingly to do harm.”

No professional, be he doctor, lawyer, or manager, can promise

that he will indeed do good for his client. All he can do is try.

But he can promise that he will not knowingly do harm. And the

client, in turn, must be able to trust the professional not

knowingly to do him harm. Otherwise he cannot trust him at all.

The professional has to have autonomy. He cannot be controlled,

supervised, or directed by the client. He has to be private in

that his knowledge and his judgment have to be entrusted with the

decision. But it is the foundation of his autonomy, and indeed its

rationale, that he see himself as “affected with the public

interest.” A professional, in other words, is private in the sense

that he is autonomous and not subject to political or ideological

control. But he is public in the sense that the welfare of his

client sets limits to his deeds and words. And Primum non nocere,

“not knowingly to do harm,” is the basic rule of professional

ethics, the basic rule of an ethics of public responsibility.

The manager who fails to think through and work for the

appropriate solution to an impact of his business because it makes

him “unpopular in the club” knowingly does harm. He knowingly

abets a cancerous growth. That this is stupid has been said. That

this always in the end hurts the business or the industry more

than a little temporary “unpleasantness” would have hurt has been

said, too. But it is also gross violation of professional ethics.

But there are other aspects to this issue as well. American

managers, in particular, tend to violate the rule usually without

knowing that they do so, and in so doing they cause harm,

especially with respect to:

Executive compensation

Use of benefit plans to impose “golden fetters” on people in

the company’s employ

Their profit rhetoric

Their actions and their words in these areas tend to cause

social disruption. They tend to conceal reality and to create

disease, or at least social hypochondria. They tend to misdirect

and to prevent understanding. And this is grievous social harm.

The fact of increasing income equality in U.S. society is quite

clear. Yet the popular impression is one of rapidly increasing

inequality. This is illusion; but it is a dangerous illusion. It

corrodes. It destroys mutual trust between groups that have to

live together and work together. It can only lead to political

measures that, while doing no one any good, can seriously harm

society, economy, and the manager as well.

The $500,000 a year that the chief executive of one of the

giant corporations is being paid is largely “make-believe money.”

Its function is status rather than income. Most of it, whatever

tax loopholes the lawyers might find, is immediately taxed away.

And the “extras” are simply attempts to put a part of the

executive’s income into a somewhat lower tax bracket.

Economically, in other words, neither serves much purpose. But

socially and psychologically they “knowingly do harm.” They cannot

be defended.

What is pernicious, however, is the illusion of inequality. The

basic cause is the tax laws. But the managers’ willingness to

accept, and indeed to play along with, an antisocial tax structure

is a major contributory cause. And unless managers realize that

this violates the rule “not knowingly to do damage,” they will, in

the end, be the main sufferers.

A second area in which the manager of today does not live up to

the commitment of Primum non nocere is closely connected with

compensation.

Retirement benefits, extra compensation, bonuses, and stock

options are all forms of compensation. From the point of view of

the enterprise—but also from the point of view of the

economy—these are “labor costs” no matter how they are labeled.

They are treated as such by managements when they sit down to

negotiate with the labor union. But increasingly, if only because

of the bias of the tax laws, these benefits are being used to tie

an employee to his employer. They are being made dependent on

staying with the same employer, often for many years. And they are

structured in such a way that leaving a company’s employ entails

drastic penalties and actual loss of benefits that have already

been earned and that, in effect, constitute wages relating to the

past employment.

Golden fetters do not strengthen the company. People who know

that they are not performing in their present employment—that is,

people who are clearly in the wrong place—will often not move but

stay where they know they do not properly belong. But if they stay

because the penalty for leaving is too great, they resist and

resent it. They know that they have been bribed and were too weak

to say no. They are likely to be sullen, resentful, and bitter the

rest of their working lives.

Pension rights, performance bonuses, participation in profits,

and so on, have been “earned” and should be available to the

employee without restricting his rights as a citizen, an

individual, and a person. And, again, managers will have to work

to get the tax law changes that are needed.

Managers, finally, through their rhetoric, make it impossible

for the public to understand economic reality. This violates the

requirement that managers, being leaders, not knowingly do harm.

This is particularly true of the United States but also of Western

Europe. For in the West, managers still talk constantly of the

profit motive. And they still define the goal of their business as

profit maximization. They do not stress the objective function of

profit. They do not talk of risks—or very rarely. They do not

stress the need for capital. They almost never even mention the

cost of capital, let alone that a business has to produce enough

profit to obtain the capital it needs at minimum cost.

Managers constantly complain about the hostility to profit.

They rarely realize that their own rhetoric is one of the main

reasons for this hostility. For indeed in the terms management

uses when it talks to the public, there is no possible

justification for profit, no explanation for its existence, no

function it performs. There is only the profit motive, that is,

the desire of some anonymous capitalists—and why that desire

should be indulged in by society any more than bigamy, for

instance, is never explained. But profitability is a crucial need

of economy and society.

Primum non nocere may seem tame compared with the rousing calls

for “statesmanship” that abound in today’s manifestos on social

responsibility. But, as the physicians found out long ago, it is

not an easy rule to live up to. Its very modesty and

self-constraint make it the right rule for the ethics that

managers need, the ethics of responsibility.

6.

MANAGEMENT’S NEW

PARADIGMS

Basic assumptions about reality are the paradigms of a social

science, such as management. They are usually held subconsciously

by the scholars, the writers, the teachers, the practitioners in

the field, and are incorporated into the discipline by their

various formulations. Thus those assumptions by this select group

of people largely determine what the discipline assumes to be

reality.

The discipline’s basic assumptions about reality determine what

it focuses on. They determine what a discipline considers “facts,”

and indeed what the discipline considers itself to be all about.

The assumptions also largely determine what is being disregarded

or is being pushed aside as an “annoying exception.”

Yet, despite their importance, the assumptions are rarely

analyzed, rarely studied, rarely challenged—indeed rarely even

made explicit.

For a social discipline such as management, the assumptions are

actually a good deal more important than are the paradigms for a

natural science. The paradigm—that is, the prevailing general

theory—has no impact on the natural universe. Whether the paradigm

states that the sun rotates around the earth or that, on the

contrary, the earth rotates around the sun has no effect on sun

and earth. A natural science deals with the behavior of objects.

But a social discipline such as management deals with the behavior

of people and human institutions. Practitioners will therefore

tend to act and to behave as the discipline’s assumptions tell

them to. Even more important, the reality of a natural science,

the physical universe and its laws, do not change (or if they do

only over eons rather than over centuries, let alone over

decades). The social universe has no “natural laws” of this kind.

It is thus subject to continual change. And this means that

assumptions that were valid yesterday can become invalid and,

indeed, totally misleading in no time at all.

What matters most in a social discipline such as management are

therefore the basic assumptions. And a change in the basic

assumptions matters even more.

Since the study of management first began—and it truly did not

emerge until the 1930s—two sets of assumptions regarding the

realities of management have been held by most scholars, most

writers and most practitioners:

One set of assumptions underlies the discipline of management:

Management is business management.

There is—or there must be—one right organization structure.

There is—or there must be—one right way to manage people.

Another set of assumptions underlies the practice of

management:

Technologies, markets and end uses are given.

Management’s scope is legally defined.

Management is internally focused.

The economy as defined by national boundaries is the “ecology”

of enterprise and management.

Management Is Business Management

For most people, inside and outside management, this assumption

is taken as self-evident. Indeed management writers, management

practitioners, and the laity do not even hear the word

“management”; they automatically hear business management.

This assumption regarding the universe of management is of

fairly recent origin. Before the 1930s the few writers and

thinkers who concerned themselves with management—beginning with

Frederick Winslow Taylor around the turn of the century and ending

with Chester Barnard just before World War II—all assumed that

business management is just a subspecies of general management and

basically no more different from the management of any other

organization than one breed of dogs is from another.

What led to the identification of management with business

management was the Great Depression with its hostility to business

and its contempt for business executives. In order not to be

tarred with the business brush, management in the public sector

was rechristened “public administration” and proclaimed a separate

discipline—with its own university departments, its own

terminology, its own career ladder. At the same time—and for the

same reason—what had begun as a study of management in the rapidly

growing hospital (e.g., by Raymond Sloan, the younger brother of

GM’s Alfred Sloan) was split off as a separate discipline and

christened “hospital administration.”

Not to be called “management” was, in other words, “political

correctness” in the Depression years.

In the postwar period, however, the fashion turned. By 1950

“business” had become a “good word”—largely the result of the

performance during World War II of American business management.

And then very soon business management became “politically

correct” as a field of study, above all. And ever since,

management has remained identified in the public mind as well as

in academia with business management.

Now, we are beginning to unmake this sixty-year-old mistake— as

witness the renaming of so many “business schools” as “schools of

management,” the rapidly growing offerings in “nonprofit

management” by these schools, the emergence of “executive

management programs” recruiting both business and nonbusiness

executives, or the emergence of departments of “pastoral

management” in divinity schools.

But the assumption that management is business management still

persists. It is therefore important to assert—and to do so

loudly—that management is not business management—any more than,

say, medicine is obstetrics.

There are, of course, differences in management among different

organizations—mission defines strategy, after all, and strategy

defines structure. There surely are differences in managing a

chain of retail stores and managing a Catholic diocese (though

amazingly fewer than either chain stores or bishops might

believe); in managing an air base, a hospital, and a software

company. But the greatest differences are in the terms individual

organizations use. Otherwise the differences are mainly in

application rather than in principles. There are not even

tremendous differences in tasks and challenges.

The first conclusion of this analysis of the assumptions that

must underlie management to make productive both its study and its

practice is therefore:

Management is the specific and distinguishing organ of any and

all organizations.

The One Right Organization

Concern with management and its study began with the sudden

emergence of large organizations—business, governmental civil

service, the large standing army—which was the novelty of

late-nineteenth-century society.

And from the very beginning more than a century ago, the study

of organization has rested on one assumption:

There is—or there must be—one right organization.

What is presented as the “one right organization” has changed

more than once. But the search for the one right organization has

continued and continues today.

It was World War I that made clear the need for a formal

organization structure. But it was also World War I that showed

that Fayol’s (and Carnegie’s) functional structure was not the one

right organization. Immediately after World War I first Pierre S.

Du Pont (1870–1954) and then Alfred Sloan (1875–1966) developed

the principle of decentralization. And now, in the last few years,

we have come to tout the team as the one right organization for

pretty much everything.

By now, however, it should have become clear that there is no

such thing as the one right organization. There are only

organizations, each of which has distinct strengths, distinct

limitations, and specific applications. It has become clear that

organization is not an absolute. It is a tool for making people

productive in working together. As such, a given organization

structure fits certain tasks in certain conditions and at certain

times.

One hears a great deal today about “the end of hierarchy.” This

is blatant nonsense. In any institution there has to be a final

authority, that is, a “boss”—someone who can make the final

decisions and who can expect them to be obeyed. In a situation of

common peril—and every institution is likely to encounter it

sooner or later—survival of all depends on clear command. If the

ship goes down, the captain does not call a meeting, the captain

gives an order. And if the ship is to be saved, everyone must obey

the order, must know exactly where to go and what to do, and do it

without “participation” or argument. “Hierarchy,” and the

unquestioning acceptance of it by everyone in the organization, is

the only hope in a crisis.

Other situations within the same institution require

deliberation. Others still require teamwork—and so on.

Organization theory assumes that institutions are homogeneous

and that, therefore, the entire enterprise should be organized the

same way.

But in any one enterprise—probably even in Fayol’s “typical

manufacturing company”—there is need for a number of different

organization structures coexisting side by side.

Managing foreign currency exposure is an increasingly

critical—and increasingly difficult—task in a world economy. It

requires total centralization. No one unit of the enterprise can

be permitted to handle its own foreign currency exposures. But in

the same enterprise servicing the customer, especially in

high-tech areas, requires almost complete local autonomy—going way

beyond traditional decentralization. Each of the individual

service people has to be the “boss,” with the rest of the

organization taking its direction from them.

Certain forms of research require a strict functional

organization with all specialists “playing their instrument” by

themselves. Other kinds of research, however, especially research

that involves decision-making at an early stage (e.g., some

pharmaceutical research), require teamwork from the beginning. And

the two kinds of research often occur side by side and in the same

research organization.

The belief that there must be one right organization is closely

tied to the fallacy that management is business management. If

earlier students of management had not been blinkered by this

fallacy but had looked at nonbusinesses, they would soon have

found that there are vast differences in organization structure

according to the nature of the task.

A Catholic diocese is organized very differently from an opera.

A modern army is organized very differently from a hospital.

There are indeed some “principles” of organization.

One is surely that organization has to be transparent. People

have to know and have to understand the organization structure

they are supposed to work in. This sounds obvious—but it is far

too often violated in most institutions (even in the military).

Another principle I have already mentioned: Someone in the

organization must have the authority to make the final decision in

a given area. And someone must clearly be in command in a crisis.

It also is a sound principle that authority be commensurate with

responsibility.

It is a sound principle that one person in an organization

should have only one “master.” There is wisdom to the old proverb

of the Roman law that a slave who has three masters is a free man.

It is a very old principle of human relations that no one should

be put into a conflict of loyalties—and having more than one

“master” creates such a conflict (which, by the way, is the reason

that the “jazz combo” team, so popular now, is so difficult—every

one of its members has two masters, the head of the specialty

function, for example, engineering, and the team leader). It is a

sound, structural principle to have the fewest layers, that is, to

have an organization that is as “flat” as possible—if only

because, as information theory tells us, “every relay doubles the

noise and cuts the message in half.”

But these principles do not tell us what to do. They only tell

us what not to do. They do not tell us what will work. They tell

us what is unlikely to work. These principles are not too

different from the ones that inform an architect’s work. They do

not tell him what kind of building to build. They tell him what

the restraints are. And this is pretty much what the various

principles of organization structure do.

One implication: Individuals will have to be able to work at

one and the same time in different organization structures. For

one task they will work in a team. But for another task they will

have to work—and at the same time—in a command-and-control

structure. The same individual who is a “boss” within his or her

own organization is a “partner” in an alliance, a minority

participation, a joint venture, and so on. Organizations, in other

words, will have to become part of the executive’s toolbox.

Even more important: We need to go to work on studying the

strengths and the limitations of different organizations. For what

tasks are what organizations most suitable? For what tasks are

what organizations least suitable? And when, in the performance of

a task, should we switch from one kind of organization to another?

One area in which research and study are particularly needed is

the organization of top management.

And I doubt that anyone would assert that we really know how to

organize the top management job, whether in a business, a

university, a hospital, or even a modern church.

One clear sign is the growing disparity between our rhetoric

and our practice. We talk incessantly about “teams”—and every

study comes to the conclusion that the top management job does

indeed require a team. Yet we now practice—and not only in

American industry—the most extreme “personality cult” of CEO

supermen. And no one seems to pay the slightest attention in our

present worship of these larger-than-life CEOs to the question of

how and by what process they are to be succeeded—and yet,

succession has always been the ultimate test of any top management

and the ultimate test of any institution.

There is, in other words, an enormous amount of work to be done

in organizational theory and organization practice—even though

both are the oldest areas of organized work and organized practice

in management.

The pioneers of management a century ago were right.

Organizational structure is needed. The modern enterprise—whether

business, civil service, university, hospital, large church, or

large military—needs organization just as any biological

organization beyond the amoeba needs structure. But the pioneers

were wrong in their assumption that there is—or should be—one

right organization. Just as there are a great number of different

structures for biological organizations, so there are a number of

organizations for the social organism that is the modern

institution.

Instead of searching for the right organization, management

needs to learn to look for, to develop, to test

The organization that fits the task.

The One Right Way to Manage People

In no other area are the basic traditional assumptions held as

firmly—though mostly subconsciously—as in respect to people and

their management. And in no other area are they so totally at odds

with reality and so totally counterproductive.

There is one right way to manage people––or at least there

should be.

This assumption underlies practically every book or paper on

the management of people. Its most quoted exposition is Douglas

McGregor’s book The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), which

asserted that managements have to choose between two and only two

different ways of managing people, “Theory X” and “Theory Y,” and

which then asserted that Theory Y is the only sound one. (A little

earlier I had said pretty much the same thing in my 1954 book The

Practice of Management.) A few years later Abraham H. Maslow

(1908–1970) showed in his Eupsychian Management (1962; new edition

1995 entitled Maslow on Management) that both McGregor and I were

dead wrong. He showed conclusively that different people have to

be managed differently.

I became an immediate convert—Maslow’s evidence is

overwhelming. But to date very few people have paid much

attention.

On this fundamental assumption that there is—or at least should

be—one and only one right way to manage people, rest all the other

assumptions about people in organizations and their management.

One of these assumptions is that the people who work for an

organization are employees of the organization, working full-time,

and dependent on the organization for their livelihood and their

careers. Another such assumption is that the people who work for

an organization are subordinates. Indeed, it is assumed that the

great majority of these people have either no skill or low skills

and do what they are being assigned to do.

Eighty years ago, when these assumptions were first formulated,

during and at the end of World War I, they conformed close enough

to reality to be considered valid. Today every one of them has

become untenable. The majority of people who work for an

organization may still be employees of the organization. But a

very large and steadily growing minority—though working for the

organization—are no longer its employees, let alone its full-time

employees. They work for an outsourcing contractor, for example,

the outsourcing firm that provides maintenance in a hospital or a

manufacturing plant, or the outsourcing firm that runs the

data-processing system for a government agency or a business. They

are “temps” or part-timers. Increasingly they are individual

contractors working on a retainer or for a specific contractual

period; this is particularly true of the most knowledgeable and

therefore the most valuable people working for the organization.

Even if employed full-time by the organization, fewer and fewer

people are “subordinates”—even in fairly low-level jobs.

Increasingly they are “knowledge workers.” And knowledge workers

are not subordinates; they are “associates.” For, once beyond the

apprentice stage, knowledge workers must know more about their job

than their boss does—or else they are no good at all. In fact,

that they know more about their job than anybody else in the

organization is part of the definition of knowledge workers.

Add to this that today’s “superiors” usually have not held the

jobs their “subordinates” hold—as they did only a few short

decades ago and as still is widely assumed they do.

A regimental commander in the army, only a few decades ago, had

held every one of the jobs of his subordinates—battalion

commander, company commander, platoon commander. The only

difference in these respective jobs between the lowly platoon

commander and the lordly regimental commander was in the number of

people each commands; the work they did was exactly alike. To be

sure, today’s regimental commanders have commanded troops earlier

in their careers—but often for a short period only. They also have

advanced through captain and major. But for most of their careers

they have held very different assignments—in staff jobs, in

research jobs, in teaching jobs, attached to an embassy abroad and

so on. They simply can no longer assume that they know what their

“subordinate,” the captain in charge of a company, is doing or

trying to do—they have been captains, of course, but they may have

never commanded a company.

Similarly, the vice president of marketing may have come up the

sales route. He or she knows a great deal about selling, but knows

nothing about market research, pricing, packaging, service, sales

forecasting. The marketing vice president therefore cannot

possibly tell the experts in the marketing department what they

should be doing, and how. Yet they are supposed to be the

marketing vice president’s “subordinates”—and the marketing vice

president is definitely responsible for their performance and for

their contribution to the company’s marketing efforts.

The same is true for the hospital administrator or the

hospital’s medical director in respect to the trained knowledge

workers in the clinical laboratory or in physical therapy.

To be sure, these associates are “subordinates” in that they

depend on the “boss” when it comes to being hired or fired,

promoted, appraised and so on. But in his or her own job the

superior can perform only if these so-called subordinates take

responsibility for educating him or her, that is, for making the

“superior” understand what market research or physical therapy can

do and should be doing, and what “results” are in their respective

areas. In turn, these “subordinates” depend on the superior for

direction. They depend on the superior to tell them what the

“score” is.

Their relationship, in other words, is far more like that

between the conductor of an orchestra and the instrumentalist than

it is like the traditional superior/subordinate relationship. The

superior in an organization employing knowledge workers cannot, as

a rule, do the work of the supposed subordinate any more than the

conductor of an orchestra can play the tuba. In turn, the

knowledge worker is dependent on the superior to give direction

and, above all, to define what the “score” is for the entire

organization, that is, what are its standards and values,

performance and results. And just as an orchestra can sabotage

even the ablest conductor—and certainly even the most autocratic

one—a knowledge organization can easily sabotage even the ablest,

let alone the most autocratic, superior.

Altogether, an increasing number of people who are full-time

employees have to be managed as if they were volunteers. They are

paid, to be sure. But knowledge workers have mobility. They can

leave. They own their “means of production,” which is their

knowledge.

We have known for fifty years that money alone does not

motivate to perform. Dissatisfaction with money grossly

demotivates. Satisfaction with money is, however, mainly a

“hygiene factor,” as Frederick Herzberg called it all of forty

years ago in his 1959 book The Motivation to Work. What

motivates—and especially what motivates knowledge workers—is what

motivates volunteers. Volunteers, we know, have to get more

satisfaction from their work than paid employees, precisely

because they do not get a paycheck. They need, above all,

challenge. They need to know the organization’s mission and to

believe in it. They need continual training. They need to see

results.

Implicit in this is that different groups in the work

population have to be managed differently, and that the same group

in the work population has to be managed differently at different

times. Increasingly “employees” have to be managed as

“partners”—and it is the definition of a partnership that all

partners are equal. It is also the definition of a partnership

that partners cannot be ordered. They have to be persuaded.

Increasingly, therefore, the management of people is a “marketing

job.” And in marketing one does not begin with the question, What

do we want? One begins with the questions, What does the other

party want? What are its values? What are its goals? What does it

consider results? And this is neither “Theory X” nor “Theory Y,”

nor any other specific theory of managing people.

Maybe we will have to redefine the task altogether. It may not

be “managing the work of people.” The starting point both in

theory and in practice may have to be “managing for performance.”

The starting point may be a definition of results—just as the

starting points of both the orchestra conductor and the football

coach are the score.

The productivity of the knowledge worker is likely to become

the center of the management of people, just as the work on the

productivity of the manual worker became the center of managing

people a hundred years ago, that is, since Frederick W. Taylor.

This will require, above all, very different assumptions about

people in organizations and their work:

One does not “manage” people.

The task is to lead people.

And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and

knowledge of each individual.

Technologies and End Uses Are Fixed and Given

Four major assumptions, as stated above, have been underlying

the practice of management all along—in fact for much longer than

there has been a discipline of management.

The assumptions about technology and end uses to a very large

extent underlie the rise of modern business and of the modern

economy altogether. They go back to the very early days of the

Industrial Revolution.

When the textile industry first developed out of what had been

cottage industries, it was assumed—and with complete validity—that

the textile industry had its own unique technology. The same was

true in respect to coal mining, and of any of the other industries

that arose in the late eighteenth century and the first half of

the nineteenth century. The first one to understand this and to

base a major enterprise on it was also one of the first men to

develop what we would today call a modern business, the German

Werner Siemens (1816–1892). It led him in 1869 to hire the first

university-trained scientist to start a modern research

lab—devoted exclusively to what we would now call electronics, and

based on a clear understanding that electronics (in those days

called “low-voltage”) was distinct and separate from all other

industries, and had its distinct and separate technology.

Out of this insight grew not only Siemens’s own company with

its own research lab, but also the German chemical industry, which

assumed worldwide leadership because it based itself on the

assumption that chemistry—and especially organic chemistry—had its

own unique technology. Out of it then grew all the other major

companies the world over, whether the American electrical and

chemical companies, the automobile companies, the telephone

companies, and so on. Out of this insight then grew what may well

be the most successful invention of the nineteenth century, the

research laboratory—the last one almost a century after Siemens’s,

the 1950 lab of IBM—and at around the same time the research labs

of the major pharmaceutical companies as they emerged as a

worldwide industry after World War II.

By now this assumption has become untenable. The best example

is of course the pharmaceutical industry, which increasingly has

come to depend on technologies that are fundamentally different

from the technologies on which the pharmaceutical research lab is

based: genetics, for instance, microbiology, molecular biology,

medical electronics, and so on.

In the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the

twentieth century, it could be taken for granted that technologies

outside one’s own industry had no, or at least only minimal,

impact on the industry. Now the assumption to start with is that

the technologies that are likely to have the greatest impact on a

company and an industry are technologies outside its own field.

The original assumption was of course that one’s own research

lab would and could produce everything the company—or the

company’s industry—needed. And in turn the assumption was that

everything that this research lab produced would be used in and by

the industry that it served.

This, for instance, was the clear foundation of what was

probably the most successful of all the great research labs of the

last hundred years, the Bell Labs of the American telephone

system. Founded in the early 1920s, the Bell Labs until the late

1960s did indeed produce practically every new knowledge and every

new technology the telephone industry needed. And in turn

practically everything the Bell Labs scientists produced found its

main use in the telephone system. This changed drastically with

what was probably the Bell Labs’ greatest scientific achievement:

the transistor. The telephone company itself did become a heavy

user of the transistor. But the main uses of the transistor were

outside the telephone system. This was so unexpected that the Bell

Telephone Company, when the transistor was first developed,

virtually gave it away—it did not see enough use for it within the

telephone system. But it also did not see any use for it outside

it. And so what was the most revolutionary development that came

out of the Bell Labs—and certainly the most valuable one—was sold

freely to all comers for the paltry sum of twenty-five thousand

dollars. It is on this total failure of the Bell Labs to

understand the significance of its own achievement that

practically all modern electronics companies outside of the

telephone are based.

Conversely, the things that have revolutionized the telephone

system—such as digital switching or the fiberglass cable—did not

come out of the Bell Labs. They came out of technologies that were

foreign to telephone technology. And this has been typical

altogether of the last thirty to fifty years—and it is

increasingly becoming more typical of every industry.

Today’s technologies, unlike those of the nineteenth century,

no longer run in parallel lines. They constantly crisscross.

Constantly, something in a technology of which people in a given

industry have barely heard (just as the people in the

pharmaceutical industry had never heard of genetics, let alone of

medical electronics) revolutionizes an industry and its

technology. Constantly, such outside technologies force an

industry to learn, to acquire, to adapt, to change its very

mind-set, let alone its technical knowledge.

Equally important to the rise of nineteenth- and

early-twentieth-century industry and companies was a second

assumption: End uses are fixed and given. For a certain end use,

for example, to put beer into containers, there may have been

extreme competition between various suppliers of containers. But

all of them, until recently, were glass companies, and there was

only one way of putting beer into containers, a glass bottle.

This was accepted as obvious not only by business, industry,

and the consumer, but by governments as well. The American

regulation of business rests on the assumptions that to every

industry pertains a unique technology and that to every end use

pertains a specific and unique product or service. These are the

assumptions on which antitrust legislation was based. And to this

day antitrust advocates concern themselves with the domination of

the market in glass bottles and pay little attention to the fact

that beer increasingly is not put into glass bottles but into cans

(or, vice versa, they concern themselves exclusively with the

concentration of supply in respect to metal containers for beer,

paying no attention to the fact that beer is still being put into

glass bottles, but also increasingly into plastic cans).

But since World War II, end uses are not uniquely tied anymore

to a certain product or service. The plastics of course were the

first major exception to the rule. But by now it is clear that it

is not just one material moving in on what was considered the

“turf” of another one. Increasingly, the same want is being

satisfied by very different means. It is the want that is unique,

and not the means to satisfy it.

As late as the beginning of World War II, news was basically

the monopoly of the newspaper—an eighteenth-century invention that

saw its biggest growth in the early years of the twentieth

century. By now there are several competing ways to deliver news:

still the printed newspaper; increasingly, the same newspaper

delivered on-line through the Internet; radio; television;

separate news organizations that use only electronics—as is

increasingly the case with economic and business news—and quite a

few additional ones.

And then there is the new “basic resource” information. It

differs radically from all other commodities in that it does not

stand under the scarcity theorem. On the contrary, it stands under

an abundance theorem. If I sell a thing—for example, a book—I no

longer have the book. If I impart information, I still have it.

And in fact, information becomes more valuable the more people

have it. What this means for economics is well beyond the scope of

this book—though it is clear that it will force us radically to

revise basic economic theory. But it also means a good deal for

management. Increasingly basic assumptions will have to be

changed. Information does not pertain to any industry or to any

business. Information also does not have any one end use, nor does

any end use require a particular kind of information or depend on

one particular kind of information.

Management therefore now has to start out with the assumption

that there is no one technology that pertains to any industry and

that, on the contrary, all technologies are capable—and indeed

likely—to be of major importance to any industry and to have

impact on any industry. Management similarly has to start with the

assumption that there is no one given end use for any product or

service and that, conversely, no end use is going to be linked to

any one product or service.

Some implications of this are that increasingly the

noncustomers of an enterprise—whether a business, a university, a

church, a hospital—are as important as the customers, if not more

important.

Even the biggest enterprise (other than a government monopoly)

has many more noncustomers than it has customers. There are very

few institutions that supply as large a percentage of a market as

30 percent. There are therefore few institutions where the

noncustomers do not amount to at least 70 percent of the potential

market. And yet very few institutions know anything about the

noncustomers—very few of them even know that they exist, let alone

know who they are. And even fewer know why they are not customers.

Yet it is with the noncustomers that changes always start.

Another critical implication is that the starting point for

management can no longer be its own product or service, and not

even its known market and its known end uses for its products and

services. The starting point has to be what customers consider

value. The starting point has to be the assumption—an assumption

amply proven by all our experience—that the customer never buys

what the supplier sells. What is value to the customer is always

something quite different from what is value or quality to the

supplier. This applies as much to a business as to a university or

to a hospital.

Management, in other words, will increasingly have to be based

on the assumption that neither technology nor end use is a

foundation for management policy. They are limitations. The

foundations have to be customer values and customer decisions on

the distribution of their disposable income. It is with those that

management policy and management strategy increasingly will have

to start.

Management’s Scope Is Legally Defined

Management, both in theory and in practice, deals with the

legal entity, the individual enterprise—whether the business

corporation, the hospital, the university, and so on. The scope of

management is thus legally defined. This has been—and still is—the

almost universal assumption.

One reason for this assumption is the traditional concept of

management as being based on command and control. Command and

control are indeed legally defined. The chief executive of a

business, the bishop of a diocese, the administrator of a

hospital, have no command and control authority beyond the legal

confines of their institution.

Almost a hundred years ago, it first became clear that the

legal definition was not adequate to manage a major enterprise.

The Japanese are usually credited with the invention of the

“keiretsu,” the management concept in which the suppliers to an

enterprise are tied together with their main customer, for

example, Toyota, for planning, product development, cost control,

and so on. But actually the keiretsu is much older and an American

invention. It goes back to around 1910 and to the man who first

saw the potential of the automobile to become a major industry,

William C. Durant (1861–1947). It was Durant who created General

Motors by buying up small but successful automobile manufacturers

such as Buick and merging them into one big automobile company. A

few years later Durant then realized that he needed to bring the

main suppliers into his corporation. He began to buy up and merge

into General Motors one parts and accessories maker after the

other, finishing in 1920 by buying Fisher Body, the country’s

largest manufacturer of automobile bodies. With this purchase

General Motors had come to own the manufacturers of 70 percent of

everything that went into its automobiles—and had become by far

the world’s most integrated large business. It was this prototype

keiretsu that gave General Motors the decisive advantage, both in

cost and in speed, which made it within a few short years both the

world’s largest and the world’s most profitable manufacturing

company, and the unchallenged leader in an exceedingly competitive

American automobile market. In fact, for some thirty-odd years,

General Motors enjoyed a 30 percent cost advantage over all its

competitors, including Ford and Chrysler.

But the Durant keiretsu was still based on the belief that

management means command and control—this was the reason that

Durant bought all the companies that became part of General

Motors’s keiretsu. And this eventually became the greatest

weakness of GM. Durant had carefully planned to ensure the

competitiveness of the GM-owned accessory suppliers. Each of them

(except Fisher Body) had to sell 50 percent of its output outside

of GM, that is, to competing automobile manufacturers, and thus

had to maintain competitive costs and competitive quality. But

after World War II the competing automobile manufacturers

disappeared—and with them the check on the competitiveness of GM’s

wholly owned accessory divisions. Also, with the unionization of

the automobile industry in 1936–1937, the high labor costs of

automobile assembly plants were imposed on General Motors’s

accessory divisions, which put them at a cost disadvantage that to

this day they have not been able to overcome. That Durant based

his keiretsu on the assumption that management means command and

control largely explains, in other words, the decline of General

Motors in the last twenty-five years and the company’s inability

to turn itself around.

This was clearly realized in the 1920s and 1930s by the builder

of the next keiretsu, Sears, Roebuck. As Sears became America’s

largest retailer, especially of appliances and hardware, it too

realized the necessity of bringing together into one group its

main suppliers so as to make possible joint planning, joint

product development and product design, and cost control across

the entire economic chain. But instead of buying these suppliers,

Sears bought small minority stakes in them—more as a token of its

commitment than as an investment—and based the relationship

otherwise on contract. And the next keiretsu builder—and probably

the most successful one so far (even more successful than the

Japanese)—was Marks & Spencer in England, which, beginning in the

early 1930s, integrated practically all its suppliers into its own

management system, but exclusively through contracts rather than

through ownership stakes or ownership control.

It is the Marks & Spencer model that the Japanese, quite

consciously, copied in the 1960s.

In every case, beginning with General Motors, the keiretsu—that

is, the integration into one management system of enterprises that

are linked economically rather than controlled legally—has given a

cost advantage of at least 25 percent and more often 30 percent.

In every case, it has given dominance in the industry and in the

marketplace.

And yet the keiretsu is not enough. It is still based on power.

Whether it is General Motors and the small, independent accessory

companies that Durant bought between 1915 and 1920; or Sears,

Roebuck; or Marks & Spencer; or Toyota—the central company has

overwhelming economic power. The keiretsu is not based on a

partnership of equals. It is based on the dependence of the

suppliers.

Increasingly, however, the economic chain brings together

genuine partners, that is, institutions in which there is equality

of power and genuine independence. This is true of the partnership

between a pharmaceutical company and the biology faculty of a

major research university. It is true of the joint ventures

through which American industry got into Japan after World War II.

It is true of the partnerships today between chemical and

pharmaceutical companies and companies in genetics, molecular

biology, or medical electronics.

These companies in the new technologies may be quite small—and

very often are—and badly in need of capital. But they own

independent technology. Therefore they are the senior partners

when it comes to technology. They, rather than the much bigger

pharmaceutical or chemical company, have a choice of with whom to

ally themselves. The same is largely true in information

technology, and also in finance. And then neither the traditional

keiretsu nor command and control work.

What is needed, therefore, is a redefinition of the scope of

management. Management has to encompass the entire process. For

business this means by and large the economic process.

The new assumption on which management, both as a discipline

and as a practice, will increasingly have to base itself is that

the scope of management is not legal.

It has to be operational. It has to embrace the entire process.

It has to be focused on results and performance across the entire

economic chain.

Management’s Scope Is Politically Defined

It is still generally assumed in the discipline of

management—and very largely still taken for granted in the

practice of management—that the domestic economy, as defined by

national boundaries, is the ecology of enterprise and

management—and of nonbusinesses as much as of businesses.

This assumption underlies the traditional “multinational.”

As is well known, before World War I, as large a share of the

world’s production of manufactured goods and of financial services

was multinational as it is now. The 1913 leading company in any

industry, whether in manufacturing or in finance, derived as large

a share of its sales from selling outside its own country as it

did by selling inside its own country. But insofar as it produced

outside its own national boundaries, it produced within the

national boundaries of another country.

One example:

The largest supplier of war matériel to the Italian Army during

World War I was a young but rapidly growing company called Fiat in

Turin—it made all the automobiles and trucks for the Italian army.

The largest supplier of war matériel to the Austro-Hungarian army

in World War I was also a company called Fiat—in Vienna. It

supplied all the automobiles and trucks to the Austro-Hungarian

army. It was two to three times the size of its parent company.

For Austria-Hungary was a much larger market than Italy, partly

because it had a much larger population, and partly because it was

more highly developed, especially in its western parts.

Fiat-Austria was wholly owned by Fiat-Italy. But except for the

designs that came from Italy, Fiat-Austria was a separate company.

Everything it used was made or bought in Austria. All products

were sold in Austria. And every employee up to and including the

CEO was an Austrian. When World War I came, and Austria and Italy

became enemies, all the Austrians had to do, therefore, was to

change the bank account of Fiat-Austria—it kept on working as it

had all along.

Even traditional industries like the automotive industry or

insurance are no longer organized that way.

Post–World War II industries such as the pharmaceutical

industry, or the information industries, are increasingly not even

organized in “domestic” and “international” units as GM and

Allianz still are. They are run as a worldwide system in which

individual tasks, whether research, design, engineering,

development, testing and increasingly manufacturing and marketing,

are each organized “transnationally.”

One large pharmaceutical company has seven labs in seven

different countries, each focusing on one major area (e.g.,

antibiotics) but all run as one “research department” and all

reporting to the same research director in headquarters. The same

company has manufacturing plants in eleven countries, each highly

specialized and producing one or two major product groups for

worldwide distribution and sale. It has one medical director who

decides in which of five or six countries a new drug is to be

tested. But managing the company’s foreign exchange exposure is

totally centralized in one location for the entire system.

In the traditional multinational, economic reality and

political reality were congruent. The country was the “business

unit,” to use today’s term. In today’s transnational—but

increasingly, also, in the old multinationals as they are being

forced to transform themselves—the country is only a “cost

center.” It is a complication rather than the unit for

organization and the unit of business, of strategy, of production,

and so on.

Management and national boundaries are no longer congruent. The

scope of management can no longer be politically defined. National

boundaries will continue to be important.

But the new assumption has to be:

National boundaries are important primarily as restraints. The

practice of management—and by no means for businesses only—will

increasingly have to be defined operationally rather than

politically.

The Inside Is Management’s Domain

All the traditional assumptions led to one conclusion: The

inside of the organization is the domain of management.

This assumption explains the otherwise totally incomprehensible

distinction between management and entrepreneurship.

In actual practice this distinction makes no sense whatever. An

enterprise, whether a business or any other institution, that does

not innovate and does not engage in entrepreneurship will not

survive long.

It should have been obvious from the beginning that management

and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same

task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not

last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not

last long. In fact, business—and every other organization

today—has to be designed for change as the norm and to create

change rather than react to it.

But entrepreneurial activities start with the outside and are

focused on the outside. They therefore do not fit within the

traditional assumptions of management’s domain—which explains why

they have come so commonly to be regarded as different, if not

incompatible. Any organization, however, that actually believes

that management and entrepreneurship are different, let alone

incompatible, will soon find itself out of business.

The inward focus of management has been greatly aggravated in

the last decades by the rise of information technology.

Information technology so far may actually have done more damage

to management than it has helped.

The traditional assumption that the inside of the organization

is the domain of management means that management is assumed to

concern itself with efforts, if not with costs only. For effort is

the only thing that exists within an organization. And, similarly,

everything inside an organization is a cost center.

But results of any institution exist only on the outside.

It is understandable that management began as a concern for the

inside of the organization. When the large organizations first

arose—with the business enterprise, around 1870, the first and by

far the most visible one—managing the inside was the new

challenge. Nobody had ever done it before. But while the

assumption that management’s domain is the inside of the

organization originally made sense—or at least can be

explained—its continuation makes no sense whatever. It is a

contradiction of the very function and nature of organization.

Management must focus on the results and performance of the

organization. Indeed, the first task of management is to define

what results and performance are in a given organization—and this,

as anyone who has worked on it can testify, is in itself one of

the most difficult, one of the most controversial, but also one of

the most important tasks. It is therefore the specific function of

management to organize the resources of the organization for

results outside the organization.

The new assumption—and the basis for the new paradigm on which

management, both as a discipline and as a practice, has to be

based—is therefore:

Management exists for the sake of the institution’s results. It

has to start with the intended results and has to organize the

resources of the institution to attain these results. It is the

organ to make the institution, whether business, church,

university, hospital, or a battered women’s shelter, capable of

producing results outside of itself.

This chapter has not tried to give answers—intentionally so. It

has tried to raise questions. But underlying all of these is one

insight. The center of a modern society, economy, and community is

not technology. It is not information. It is not productivity. It

is the managed institution as the organ of society to produce

results. And management is the specific tool, the specific

function, the specific instrument to make institutions capable of

producing results.

This, however, requires a final new management paradigm.

Management’s concern and management’s responsibility are

everything that affects the performance of the institution and its

results—whether inside or outside, whether under the institution’s

control or totally beyond it.

7.

THE INFORMATION

EXECUTIVES NEED TODAY

Ever since the new data-processing tools first emerged thirty

or forty years ago, businesspeople have both over- and underrated

the importance of information in the organization. We—and I

include myself—overrated the possibilities to the point where we

talked of computer-generated “business models” that could make

decisions and might even be able to run much of the business. But

we also grossly underrated the new tools; we saw in them the means

to do better what executives were already doing to manage their

organizations.

Nobody talks anymore of business models making economic

decisions. The greatest contribution of our data-processing

capacity so far has not even been to management. It has been to

operations—in the form of such things as the marvelous software

that architects now use to solve structural problems in the

buildings they design.

Yet even as we both over- and underestimated the new tools, we

failed to realize that they would drastically change the tasks to

be tackled. Concepts and tools, history teaches again and again,

are mutually interdependent and interactive. One changes the

other. That is now happening to the concept we call a business and

to the tools we use to collect information. The new tools enable

us—indeed, may force us—to see our businesses differently, to see

them as

Generators of resources, that is, as the organizations that

convert costs into yields

Links in an economic chain, which managers need to understand

as a whole in order to manage their costs

Society’s organs for the creation of wealth

Both creators and creatures of a material environment, which is

the area outside the organization in which opportunities and

results lie but in which the threats to the success and survival

of every business also originate

This chapter deals with the tools executives require to

generate the information they need. And it deals with the concepts

underlying those tools. Some of the tools have been around for a

long time, but rarely, if ever, have they been focused on the task

of managing a business. Some have to be refashioned; in their

present form they no longer work. For some tools that promise to

be important in the future, we have so far only the briefest

specifications. The tools themselves still have to be designed.

Even though we are just beginning to understand how to use

information as a tool, we can outline with high probability the

major parts of the information system executives need to manage

their businesses. So, in turn, can we begin to understand the

concepts likely to underlie the business—call it the redesigned

corporation—that executives will have to manage tomorrow.

From Cost Accounting to Yield Control

We may have gone furthest in redesigning both business and

information in the most traditional of our information systems:

accounting. In fact, many businesses have already shifted from

traditional cost accounting to activity-based costing.

Activity-based costing represents both a different concept of the

business process, especially for manufacturers, and different ways

of measuring.

Traditional cost accounting, first developed by General Motors

seventy years ago, postulates that total manufacturing cost is the

sum of the costs of individual operations. Yet the cost that

matters for competitiveness and profitability is the cost of the

total process, and that is what the new activity-based costing

records and makes manageable. Its basic premise is that

manufacturing is an integrated process that starts when supplies,

materials, and parts arrive at the plant’s loading dock and

continues even after the finished product reaches the end user.

Service is still a cost of the product, and so is installation,

even if the customer pays.

Traditional cost accounting measures what it costs to do

something, for example to cut a screw thread. Activity-based

costing also records the cost of not doing, such as the cost of

machine downtime, the cost of waiting for a needed part or tool,

the cost of inventory waiting to be shipped, and the cost of

reworking or scrapping a defective part. The costs of not doing,

which traditional cost accounting cannot and does not record,

often equal and sometimes even exceed the costs of doing.

Activity-based costing therefore not only gives much better cost

control but, increasingly, it also gives result control.

Traditional cost accounting assumes that a certain

operation—for example, heat treating—has to be done and that it

has to be done where it is being done now. Activity-based costing

asks, Does it have to be done? If so, where is it best done?

Activity-based costing integrates what were once several

activities—value analysis, process analysis, quality management,

and costing—into one analysis.

Using that approach, activity-based costing can substantially

lower manufacturing costs—in some instances by a full third or

more. Its greatest impact, however, is likely to be in services.

In most manufacturing companies, cost accounting is inadequate.

But service industries—banks, retail stores, hospitals, schools,

newspapers, and radio and television stations—have practically no

cost information at all.

Activity-based costing shows us why traditional cost accounting

has not worked for service companies. It is not because the

techniques are wrong. It is because traditional cost accounting

makes the wrong assumptions. Service companies cannot start with

the cost of individual operations, as manufacturing companies have

done with traditional cost accounting. They must start with the

assumption that there is only one cost: that of the total system.

And it is a fixed cost over any given time period. The famous

distinction between fixed and variable costs, on which traditional

cost accounting is based, does not make much sense in services.

Neither does another basic assumption of traditional cost

accounting: that capital can be substituted for labor. In fact, in

knowledge-based work especially, additional capital investment

will likely require more rather than less labor. For example, a

hospital that buys a new diagnostic tool may have to add four or

five people to run it. Other knowledge-based organizations have

had to learn the same lesson.

But that all costs are fixed over a given time period and that

resources cannot be substituted for one another, so that the total

operation has to be costed—those are precisely the assumptions

with which activity-based costing starts. By applying them to

services, we are beginning for the first time to get cost

information and yield control.

Banks, for instance, have been trying for several decades to

apply conventional cost-accounting techniques to their

business—that is, to figure the costs of individual operations and

services—with almost negligible results. Now they are beginning to

ask Which one activity is at the center of costs and of results?

The answer: serving the customer. The cost per customer in any

major area of banking is a fixed cost. Thus it is the yield per

customer—both the volume of services a customer uses and the mix

of those services—that determines costs and profitability. Retail

discounters, especially those in Western Europe, have known that

for some time. They assume that once a unit of shelf space is

installed, the cost is fixed and management consists of maximizing

the yield thereon over a given time span. Their focus on yield

control has enabled them to increase profitability despite their

low prices and low margins.

Services are still only beginning to apply the new costing

concepts. In some areas, such as research labs, where productivity

is nearly impossible to measure, we may always have to rely on

assessment and judgment rather than on measurement. But for most

knowledge-based and service work, we should, within ten to fifteen

years, have developed reliable tools to measure and manage costs

and to relate those costs to results.

Thinking more clearly about costing in services should yield

new insights into the costs of getting and keeping customers in

businesses of all kinds. If GM, Ford, and Chrysler had had

activity-based costing, for example, they would have realized

early on the utter futility of their competitive blitzes of the

past few years, which offered new-car buyers spectacular discounts

and hefty cash rewards. Those promotions actually cost the Big

Three carmakers enormous amounts of money and, worse, enormous

numbers of potential customers.

From Legal Fiction to Economic Reality

Knowing the cost of your operations, however, is not enough. To

compete successfully in an increasingly competitive global market,

a company has to know the costs of its entire economic chain and

has to work with other members of the chain to manage costs and

maximize yield. Companies are therefore beginning to shift from

costing only what goes on inside their own organizations to

costing the entire economic process, in which even the biggest

company is just one link.

The legal entity, the company, is a reality for shareholders,

for creditors, for employees, and for tax collectors. But

economically, it is fiction. Thirty years ago the Coca-Cola

Company was a franchisor. Independent bottlers manufactured the

product. Now the company owns most of its bottling operations in

the United States. But Coke drinkers—even those few who know that

fact—could not care less. What matters in the marketplace is the

economic reality, the costs of the entire process, regardless of

who owns what.

Again and again in business history, an unknown company has

come from nowhere and in a few short years overtaken the

established leaders without apparently even breathing hard. The

explanation always given is superior strategy, superior

technology, superior marketing, or lean manufacturing. But in

every single case, the newcomer also enjoys a tremendous cost

advantage, usually about 30 percent. The reason is always the

same: the new company knows and manages the costs of the entire

economic chain rather than its costs alone.

Toyota is perhaps the best-publicized example of a company that

knows and manages the costs of its suppliers and distributors;

they are all, of course, members of its keiretsu. Through that

network, Toyota manages the total cost of making, distributing,

and servicing its cars as one cost stream, putting work where it

costs the least and yields the most.

Managing the economic cost stream is not a Japanese invention,

however, but an American one. It began with the man who designed

and built General Motors, William Durant. In about 1908, Durant

began to buy small, successful car companies—Buick, Oldsmobile,

Cadillac, Chevrolet—and merged them into his new General Motors

Corporation. In 1916, he set up a separate subsidiary called

United Motors to buy small, successful parts companies. His first

acquisitions included Delco, which held Charles Kettering’s

patents to the automotive self-starter.

Durant ultimately bought about twenty supplier companies; his

last acquisition—in 1919, the year before he was ousted as GM’s

CEO—was Fisher Body. Durant deliberately brought the parts and

accessories makers into the process of designing a new car model

right from the start. Doing so allowed him to manage the total

costs of the finished car as one cost stream. And in so doing,

Durant invented the keiretsu.

However, between 1950 and 1960, Durant’s keiretsu became an

albatross around the company’s neck. Unionization imposed higher

labor costs on GM’s parts divisions than on their independent

competitors. The outside customers, the independent car companies

such as Packard and Studebaker, which had bought 50 percent of the

output of GM’s parts divisions, disappeared one by one. And GM’s

control over both the costs and quality of its main suppliers

disappeared with them. Nevertheless, for more than forty years,

GM’s systems costing gave it an unbeatable advantage over even the

most efficient of its competitors, which for most of that time was

Studebaker.

Sears, Roebuck and Company was the first to copy Durant’s

system. In the 1920s it established long-term contracts with its

suppliers and bought minority interests in them. Sears was then

able to consult with suppliers as it designed the product and to

understand and manage the entire cost stream. That gave the

company an unbeatable cost advantage for decades.

In the early 1930s, London-based Marks & Spencer copied Sears,

with the same result. Twenty years later, the Japanese, led by

Toyota, studied and copied both Sears and Marks & Spencer. Then in

the 1980s, Wal-Mart Stores adapted the approach by allowing

suppliers to stock products directly on store shelves, thereby

eliminating warehouse inventories and with them nearly one-third

of the cost of traditional retailing.

But those companies are still exceptions. Although economists

have known the importance of costing the entire economic chain

since Alfred Marshall wrote about it in the late 1890s, most

businesspeople still consider it theoretical abstraction.

Increasingly, however, managing the economic cost chain will

become a necessity. Indeed, executives need to organize and manage

not only the cost chain but also everything else—especially

corporate strategy and product planning—as one economic whole,

regardless of the legal boundaries of individual companies.

A powerful force driving companies toward economic-chain

costing will be the shift from cost-led pricing to price-led

costing. Traditionally, Western companies have started with costs,

put a desired profit margin on top, and arrived at a price. They

practiced cost-led pricing. Sears and Marks & Spencer long ago

switched to price-led costing, in which the price the customer is

willing to pay determines allowable costs, beginning with the

design stage. Until recently, those companies were the exceptions.

Now price-led costing is becoming the rule. The Japanese first

adopted it for their exports. Now Wal-Mart and all the discounters

in the United States, Japan, and Europe are practicing price-led

costing. It underlies Chrysler’s success with its recent models

and the success of GM’s Saturn. Companies can practice price-led

costing, however, only if they know and manage the entire cost of

the economic chain.

The same ideas apply to outsourcing, alliances, and joint

ventures—indeed, to any business structure that is built on

partnership rather than control. And such entities, rather than

the traditional model of a parent company with wholly owned

subsidiaries, are increasingly becoming the models for growth,

especially in the global economy.

Still, it will be painful for most businesses to switch to

economic-chain costing. Doing so requires uniform or at least

compatible accounting systems at companies along the entire chain.

Yet each one does its accounting in its own way, and each is

convinced that its system is the only possible one. Moreover,

economic-chain costing requires information sharing across

companies, yet even within the same company, people tend to resist

information sharing. Despite those challenges, companies can find

ways to practice economic-chain costing now, as Procter & Gamble

is demonstrating. Using the way Wal-Mart develops close

relationships with suppliers as a model, P&G is initiating

information sharing and economic-chain management with the three

hundred large retailers that distribute the bulk of its products

worldwide.

Whatever the obstacles, economic-chain costing is going to be

done. Otherwise, even the most efficient company will suffer from

an increasing cost disadvantage.

Information for Wealth Creation

Enterprises are paid to create wealth, not to control costs.

But that obvious fact is not reflected in traditional

measurements. First-year accounting students are taught that the

balance sheet portrays the liquidation value of the enterprise and

provides creditors with worst-case information. But enterprises

are not normally run to be liquidated. They have to be managed as

going concerns, that is, for wealth creation. To do that requires

information that enables executives to make informed judgments. It

requires four sets of diagnostic tools: foundation information,

productivity information, competence information, and information

about the allocation of scarce resources. Together, they

constitute the executive’s tool kit for managing the current

business.

The oldest and most widely used set of diagnostic management

tools are cash-flow and liquidity projections and such standard

measurements as the ratio between dealers’ inventories and sales

of new cars; the earnings coverage for the interest payments on a

bond issue; and the ratios among receivables outstanding more than

six months, total receivables, and sales. Those may be likened to

the measurements a doctor takes at a routine physical: weight,

pulse, temperature, blood pressure, and urine analysis. If those

readings are normal, they do not tell us much. If they are

abnormal, they indicate a problem that needs to be identified and

treated. Those measurements might be called foundation

information.

The second set of tools for business diagnosis deals with the

productivity of key resources. The oldest of them—of World War II

vintage—measures the productivity of manual labor. Now we are

slowly developing measurements, though still quite primitive ones,

for the productivity of knowledge-based and service work. However,

measuring only the productivity of workers, whether blue- or

white-collar, no longer gives us adequate information about

productivity. We need data on total-factor productivity.

That explains the popularity of economic value-added analysis.

EVA is based on something we have known for a long time: what we

generally call profits, the money left to service equity, is

usually not profit at all. Until a business returns a profit that

is greater than its cost of capital, it operates at a loss. Never

mind that it pays taxes as if it had a genuine profit. The

enterprise still returns less to the economy than it devours in

resources. It does not cover its full costs unless the reported

profit exceeds the cost of capital. Until then, it does not create

wealth; it destroys it. By that measurement, incidentally, few

U.S. businesses have been profitable since World War II.

By measuring the value added over all costs, including the cost

of capital, EVA measures, in effect, the productivity of all

factors of production. It does not, by itself, tell us why a

certain product or a certain service does not add value or what to

do about it. But it shows us what we need to find out and whether

we need to take remedial action. EVA should also be used to

determine what works. It does show which product, service,

operation, or activity has unusually high productivity and adds

unusually high value. Then we should ask ourselves, What can we

learn from those successes?

The most recent of the tools used to obtain productivity

information is benchmarking—comparing one’s performance with the

best performance in the industry or, better yet, with the best

anywhere in business. Benchmarking assumes correctly that what one

organization does, any other organization can do as well. And it

assumes, also correctly, that being at least as good as the leader

is a prerequisite to being competitive. Together, EVA and

benchmarking provide the diagnostic tools to measure total-factor

productivity and to manage it.

A third set of tools deals with competences. Ever since C. K.

Prahalad and Gary Hamel’s pathbreaking article “The Core

Competence of the Corporation” (Harvard Business Review, May–June

1990), we have known that leadership rests on being able to do

something others cannot do at all or find difficult to do even

poorly. It rests on core competencies that meld market or customer

value with a special ability of the producer or supplier.

Some examples: the ability of the Japanese to miniaturize

electronic components, which is based on their

three-hundred-year-old artistic tradition of putting landscape

paintings on a tiny lacquered box, called an inro, and of carving

a whole zoo of animals on the even tinier button, called a

netsuke, that holds the box on the wearer’s belt; or the almost

unique ability GM has had for eighty years to make successful

acquisitions; or Marks & Spencer’s also unique ability to design

packaged and ready-to-eat gourmet meals for middle-class purses.

But how does one identify both the core competencies one has

already and those the business needs in order to take and maintain

a leadership position? How does one find out whether one’s core

competence is improving or weakening? Or whether it is still the

right core competence and what changes it might need?

So far, the discussion of core competencies has been largely

anecdotal. But a number of highly specialized midsize companies—a

Swedish pharmaceuticals producer and a U.S. producer of specialty

tools, to name two—are developing the methodology to measure and

manage core competencies. The first step is to keep careful track

of one’s own and one’s competitors’ performances, looking

especially for unexpected successes and for unexpected poor

performance in areas where one should have done well. The

successes demonstrate what the market values and will pay for.

They indicate where the business enjoys a leadership advantage.

The nonsuccesses should be viewed as the first indication either

that the market is changing or that the company’s competencies are

weakening.

That analysis allows for the early recognition of

opportunities. For example, by carefully tracking an unexpected

success, a U.S. toolmaker found that small Japanese machine shops

were buying its high-tech, high-priced tools, even though it had

not designed the tools with them in mind or even called on them.

That allowed the company to recognize a new core competence: the

Japanese were attracted to its products because they were easy to

maintain and repair despite their technical complexity. When that

insight was applied to designing products, the company gained

leadership in the small-plant and machine-shop markets in the

United States and Western Europe, huge markets where it had done

practically no business before.

Core competencies are different for every organization; they

are, so to speak, part of an organization’s personality. But every

organization—not just businesses—needs one core competence:

innovation. And every organization needs a way to record and

appraise its innovative performance. In organizations already

doing that—among them several top-flight pharmaceuticals

manufacturers—the starting point is not the company’s own

performance. It is a careful record of the innovations in the

entire field during a given period. Which of them were truly

successful? How many of them were ours? Is our performance

commensurate with our objectives? With the direction of the

market? With our market standing? With our research spending? Are

our successful innovations in the areas of greatest growth and

opportunity? How many of the truly important innovation

opportunities did we miss? Why? Because we did not see them? Or

because we saw them but dismissed them? Or because we botched

them? And how well do we convert an innovation into a commercial

product? A good deal of that, admittedly, is assessment rather

than measurement. It raises rather than answers questions, but it

raises the right questions.

The last area in which diagnostic information is needed to

manage the current business for wealth creation is the allocation

of scarce resources: capital and performing people. Those two

convert into action whatever information management has about its

business. They determine whether the enterprise will do well or

poorly.

GM developed the first systematic capital-appropriations

process about seventy years ago. Today practically every business

has a capital-appropriations process, but few use it correctly.

Companies typically measure their proposed capital appropriations

by only one or two of the following four yardsticks: return on

investment, payback period, cash flow, and discounted present

value. But we have known for a long time—since the early

1930s—that none of those is the right method. To understand a

proposed investment, a company needs to look at all four. Sixty

years ago that would have required endless number-crunching. Now a

laptop computer can provide the information within a few minutes.

We also have known for sixty years that managers should never look

at just one proposed capital appropriation in isolation but should

instead choose the projects that show the best ratio between

opportunity and risks. That requires a capital-appropriations

budget to display the choices—again, something far too many

businesses do not do. Most serious, however, is that most

capital-appropriations processes do not even ask for two vital

pieces of information:

What will happen if the proposed investment fails to produce as

promised as do three out of every five? Would it seriously hurt

the company, or would it be just a flea bite?

If the investment is successful—and especially if it is more

successful than we expect—what will it commit us to?

No one at GM seemed to have asked what Saturn’s success would

commit the company to. As a result, the company may end up killing

its own success because of its inability to finance it.

In addition, a capital-appropriations request requires specific

deadlines: when should we expect what results? Then the

results—successes, near-successes, near-failures, and

failures—need to be reported and analyzed. There is no better way

to improve an organization’s performance than to measure the

results of capital appropriations against the promises and

expectations that led to their authorization. How much better off

the United States would be today had such feedback on government

programs been standard practice for the past fifty years.

Capital, however, is only one key resource of the organization,

and it is by no means the scarcest one. The scarcest resources in

any organization are performing people. Since World War II, the

U.S. military—and so far no one else—has learned to test its

placement decisions. It now thinks through what it expects of

senior officers before it puts them into key commands. It then

appraises their performance against those expectations. And it

constantly appraises its own process for selecting senior

commanders against the successes and failures of its appointments.

In business, by contrast, placement with specific expectations as

to what the appointee should achieve and systematic appraisal of

the outcome are virtually unknown. In the effort to create wealth,

managers need to allocate human resources as purposefully and as

thoughtfully as they do capital. And the outcomes of those

decisions ought to be recorded and studied as carefully.

Where the Results Are

The four kinds of information tell us only about the current

business. They inform and direct tactics. For strategy, we need

organized information about the environment. Strategy has to be

based on information about markets, customers, and noncustomers;

about technology in one’s own industry and others; about worldwide

finance; and about the changing world economy. For that is where

the results are. Inside an organization, there are only cost

centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not

bounced.

Major changes also start outside an organization. A retailer

may know a great deal about the people who shop at its stores. But

no matter how successful it is, no retailer ever has more than a

small fraction of the market as its customers; the great majority

are noncustomers. It is always with noncustomers that basic

changes begin and become significant.

At least half the important new technologies that have

transformed an industry in the past fifty years came from outside

the industry itself. Commercial paper, which has revolutionized

finance in the United States, did not originate with the banks.

Molecular biology and genetic engineering were not developed by

the pharmaceuticals industry. Though the great majority of

businesses will continue to operate only locally or regionally,

they all face, at least potentially, global competition from

places they have never even heard of before.

Not all the needed information about the outside is available,

to be sure. There is no information—not even unreliable

information—on economic conditions in most of China, for instance,

or on legal conditions in most of the successor states to the

Soviet Empire. But even where information is readily available,

many businesses are oblivious to it. Many U.S. companies went into

Europe in the 1960s without even asking about labor legislation.

European companies have been just as blind and ill informed in

their ventures into the United States. A major cause of the

Japanese real estate investment debacle in California during the

1990s was the failure to find out elementary facts about zoning

and taxes.

A serious cause of business failure is the common assumption

that conditions—taxes, social legislation, market preferences,

distribution channels, intellectual property rights, and many

others—must be what we think they are or at least what we think

they should be. An adequate information system has to include

information that makes executives question that assumption. It

must lead them to ask the right questions, not just feed them the

information they expect. That presupposes first that executives

know what information they need. It demands further that they

obtain that information on a regular basis. It finally requires

that they systematically integrate the information into their

decision making.

A few multinationals—Unilever, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, the Japanese

trading companies, and a few big construction companies—have been

working hard on building systems to gather and organize outside

information. But in general, the majority of enterprises have yet

to start the job.

Even big companies, in large part, will have to hire outsiders

to help them. To think through what the business needs requires

somebody who knows and understands the highly specialized

information field. There is far too much information for any but

specialists to find their way around. The sources are totally

diverse. Companies can generate some of the information

themselves, such as information about customers and noncustomers

or about the technology in one’s own field. But most of what

enterprises need to know about the environment is obtainable only

from outside sources—from all kinds of data banks and data

services, from journals in many languages, from trade

associations, from government publications, from World Bank

reports and scientific papers, and from specialized studies.

Another reason why there is need for outside help is that the

information has to be organized so as to question and challenge a

company’s strategy. To supply data is not enough. The data have to

be integrated with strategy, they have to test a company’s

assumptions, and they must challenge a company’s current outlook.

One way to do that may be a new kind of software, information

tailored to a specific group—say, to hospitals or to casualty

insurance companies. The Lexis database supplies such information

to lawyers, but it only gives answers; it does not ask questions.

What we need are services that make specific suggestions about how

to use the information, ask specific questions regarding the

user’s business and practices, and perhaps provide interactive

consultation. Or we might “outsource” the outside-information

system. Perhaps the most popular provider of the

outside-information system, especially for smaller enterprises,

will be the “inside outsider,” the independent consultant.

Whichever way we satisfy it, the need for information on the

environment where the major threats and opportunities are likely

to arise will become increasingly urgent.

It may be argued that few of those information needs are new,

and that is largely true. Conceptually, many of the new

measurements have been discussed for many years and in many

places. What is new is the technical data-processing ability. It

enables us to do quickly and cheaply what, only a few short years

ago, would have been laborious and very expensive. Seventy years

ago the time and motion study made traditional cost accounting

possible. Computers have now made activity-based cost accounting

possible; without them, it would be practically impossible.

But that argument misses the point. What is important is not

the tools. It is the concepts behind them. They convert what were

always seen as discrete techniques to be used in isolation and for

separate purposes into one integrated information system. That

system then makes possible business diagnosis, business strategy,

and business decisions. That is a new and radically different view

of the meaning and purpose of information: as a measurement on

which to base future action rather than as a postmortem and a

record of what has already happened.

The command-and-control organization that first emerged in the

1870s might be compared to an organism held together by its shell.

The corporation that is now emerging is being designed around a

skeleton: information, both the corporation’s new integrating

system and its articulation.

Our traditional mind-set—even if we use sophisticated

mathematical techniques and impenetrable sociological jargon—has

always somehow perceived business as buying cheap and selling

dear. The new approach defines a business as the organization that

adds value and creates wealth.

8.

MANAGEMENT BY

OBJECTIVES AND

SELF-CONTROL

Any business enterprise must build a true team and weld

individual efforts into a common effort. Each member of the

enterprise contributes something different, but they must all

contribute toward a common goal. Their efforts must all pull in

the same direction, and their contributions must fit together to

produce a whole—without gaps, without friction, without

unnecessary duplication of effort.

Business performance therefore requires that each job be

directed toward the objectives of the whole business. And in

particular each manager’s job must be focused on the success of

the whole. The performance that is expected of the manager must be

derived from the performance goals of the business; his results

must be measured by the contribution they make to the success of

the enterprise. The manager must know and understand what the

business goals demand of him in terms of performance, and his

superior must know what contribution to demand and expect of

him—and must judge him accordingly. If these requirements are not

met, managers are misdirected. Their efforts are wasted. Instead

of teamwork, there is friction, frustration, and conflict.

Management by objectives requires major effort and special

instruments. For in the business enterprise, managers are not

automatically directed toward a common goal.

A favorite story at management meetings is that of the three

stonecutters who were asked what they were doing. The first

replied, “I am making a living.” The second kept on hammering

while he said, “I am doing the best job of stonecutting in the

entire county.” The third one looked up with a visionary gleam in

his eyes and said, “I am building a cathedral.”

The third man is, of course, the true “manager.” The first man

knows what he wants to get out of the work and manages to do so.

He is likely to give a “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”

It is the second man who is a problem. Workmanship is

essential; without it no business can flourish; in fact, an

organization becomes demoralized if it does not demand of its

members the most scrupulous workmanship they are capable of. But

there is always a danger that the true workman, the true

professional, will believe that he is accomplishing something when

in effect he is just polishing stones or collecting footnotes.

Workmanship must be encouraged in the business enterprise. But it

must always be related to the needs of the whole.

The number of highly educated specialists working in the

business enterprise is bound to increase tremendously. And so will

the level of workmanship demanded of those specialists. The

tendency to make the craft or function an end in itself will

therefore be even more marked than it is today. But at the same

time, the new technology will demand much closer coordination

among specialists. And it will demand that functional men and

women even at the lowest management level see the business as a

whole and understand what it requires of them. The new technology

will need both the drive for excellence in workmanship and the

consistent direction of managers at all levels toward the common

goal.

Misdirection

The hierarchical structure of management aggravates the danger.

What the “boss” does and says, his most casual remarks, habits,

even mannerisms, tend to appear to subordinates as calculated,

planned, and meaningful.

“All you ever hear around the place is human-relations talk;

but when the boss calls you on the carpet it is always because the

burden figure is too high; and when it comes to promoting a guy,

the plums always go to those who do the best job filling out

accounting-department forms.” This is one of the most common

tunes, sung with infinite variations on every level of management.

It leads to poor performance—even in cutting the burden figure. It

also expresses loss of confidence in, and absence of respect for,

the company and its management.

Yet the manager who so misdirects his subordinates does not

intend to do so. He genuinely considers human relations to be the

most important task of his plant managers. But he talks about the

burden figure because he feels that he has to establish himself

with his men as a “practical man,” or because he thinks that he

shows familiarity with their problems by talking “shop” with them.

He stresses the accounting-department forms only because they

annoy him as much as they do his men—or he may just not want to

have any more trouble with the comptroller than he can help. But

to his subordinates these reasons are hidden; all they see and

hear is the question about the burden figure, the emphasis on

forms.

The solution to this problem requires a structure of management

that focuses both the manager’s and his boss’s eyes on what the

job—rather than the boss—demands. To stress behavior and

attitudes—as does a good deal of current management

literature—cannot solve the problem. It is likely instead to

aggravate it by making managers self-conscious in their

relationships. Indeed, everyone familiar with business today has

seen situations in which a manager’s attempt to avoid misdirection

through changing his behavior has converted a fairly satisfactory

relationship into a nightmare of embarrassment and

misunderstanding. The manager himself has become so self-conscious

as to lose all easy relationship with his employees. And the

employees in turn react with: “So help us, the old man has read a

book; we used to know what he wanted of us, now we have to guess.”

What Should the Objectives Be?

Each manager, from the “big boss” down to the production

foreman or the chief clerk, needs clearly spelled-out objectives.

Those objectives should lay out what performance the man’s own

managerial unit is supposed to produce. They should lay out what

contribution he and his unit are expected to make to help other

units obtain their objectives. Finally, they should spell out what

contribution the manager can expect from other units toward the

attainment of his own objectives. Right from the start, in other

words, emphasis should be on teamwork and team results.

These objectives should always derive from the goals of the

business enterprise. In one company, I have found it practicable

and effective to provide even a foreman with a detailed statement

of not only his own objectives but those of the company and of the

manufacturing department. Even though the company is so large as

to make the distance between the individual foreman’s production

and the company’s total output all but astronomical, the result

has been a significant increase in production. Indeed, this must

follow if we mean it when we say that the foreman is “part of

management.” For it is the definition of a manager that in what he

does he takes responsibility for the whole—that, in cutting stone,

he “builds the cathedral.”

The objectives of every manager should spell out his

contribution to the attainment of company goals in all areas of

the business. Obviously, not every manager has a direct

contribution to make in every area. The contribution that

marketing makes to productivity, for example, may be very small.

But if a manager and his unit are not expected to contribute

toward any one of the areas that significantly affect prosperity

and survival of the business, this fact should be clearly brought

out. For managers must understand that business results depend on

a balance of efforts and output in a number of areas. This is

necessary both to give full scope to the craftsmanship of each

function and specialty, and to prevent the empire building and

clannish jealousies of the various functions and specialties. It

is necessary also to avoid overemphasis on any one key area.

To obtain balanced efforts, the objectives of all managers on

all levels and in all areas should also be keyed to both

short-range and long-range considerations. And, of course, all

objectives should always contain both the tangible business

objectives and the intangible objectives for manager organization

and development, worker performance and attitude, and public

responsibility. Anything else is shortsighted and impractical.

Management by “Drives”

Proper management requires balanced stress on objectives,

especially by top management. It rules out the common and

pernicious business malpractice: management by “crisis” and

“drives.”

There may be companies in which management people do not say,

“The only way we ever get anything done around here is by making a

drive on it.” Yet “management by drive” is the rule rather than

the exception. That things always collapse into the status quo

ante three weeks after the drive is over, everybody knows and

apparently expects. The only result of an “economy drive” is

likely to be that messengers and typists get fired, and that

$15,000 executives are forced to do $50-a-week work typing their

own letters. And yet many managements have not drawn the obvious

conclusion that drives are, after all, not the way to get things

done.

But over and above its ineffectiveness, management by drive

misdirects. It puts all emphasis on one phase of the job to the

inevitable detriment of everything else.

“For four weeks we cut inventories,” a case-hardened veteran of

management by crisis once summed it up. “Then we have four weeks

of cost-cutting, followed by four weeks of human relations. We

just have time to push customer service and courtesy for a month.

And then the inventory is back where it was when we started. We

don’t even try to do our job. All management talks about, thinks

about, preaches about, is last week’s inventory figure or this

week’s customer complaints. How we do the rest of the job they

don’t even want to know.”

In an organization that manages by drives, people either

neglect their job to get on with the current drive, or silently

organize for collective sabotage of the drive to get their work

done. In either event they become deaf to the cry of “wolf.” And

when the real crisis comes, when all hands should drop everything

and pitch in, they treat it as just another case of

management-created hysteria.

Management by drive, like management by “bellows and meat ax,”

is a sure sign of confusion. It is an admission of incompetence.

It is a sign that management does not know how to plan. But, above

all, it is a sign that the company does not know what to expect of

its managers—that, not knowing how to direct them, it misdirects

them.

How Should Objectives Be Set and by Whom?

By definition, a manager is responsible for the contribution

that his or her component makes to the larger unit above and

eventually to the enterprise. The manager’s performance aims

upward rather than downward. This means that the goals of each

manager’s job must be defined by the contribution he has to make

to the success of the larger unit of which he is a part. The

objectives of the district sales manager’s job should be defined

by the contribution he and his district sales force have to make

to the sales department; the objectives of the project engineer’s

job, by the contribution he, his engineers and draftsmen make to

the engineering department. The objectives of the general manager

of a decentralized division should be defined by the contribution

his division has to make to the objectives of the parent company.

This requires each manager to develop and set the objectives of

his unit himself. Higher management must, of course, reserve the

power to approve or disapprove those objectives. But their

development is part of a manager’s responsibility; indeed, it is

his first responsibility. It means, too, that every manager should

responsibly participate in the development of the objectives of

the higher unit of which his is a part. To “give him a sense of

participation” (to use a pet phrase of the “human relations”

jargon) is not enough. Being a manager demands the assumption of a

genuine responsibility. Precisely because his aims should reflect

the objective needs of the business, rather than merely what the

individual manager wants, he must commit himself to them with a

positive act of assent. He must know and understand the ultimate

business goals, what is expected of him and why, what he will be

measured against and how. There must be a “meeting of minds”

within the entire management of each unit. This can be achieved

only when each of the contributing managers is expected to think

through what the unit objectives are, is led, in others words, to

participate actively and responsibly in the work of defining them.

And only if his lower managers participate in this way can the

higher manager know what to expect of them and can make exacting

demands.

This is so important that some of the most effective managers I

know go one step further. They have each of their subordinates

write a “manager’s letter” twice a year. In this letter to his

superior, each manager first defines the objectives of his

superior’s job and of his own job as he sees them. He then sets

down the performance standards that he believes are being applied

to him. Next, he lists the things he must do himself to attain

these goals—and what he considers the major obstacles within his

own unit. He lists the things his superior and the company do that

help him and the things that hamper him. Finally, he outlines what

he proposes to do during the next year to reach his goals. If his

superior accepts this statement, the “manager’s letter” becomes

the charter under which the manager operates.

This device, like no other I have seen, brings out how easily

the unconsidered and casual remarks of even the best “boss” can

confuse and misdirect. One large company has used the “manager’s

letter” for ten years. Yet almost every letter still lists as

objectives and standards things that completely baffle the

superior to whom the letter is addressed. And whenever he asks,

“What is this?” he gets the answer, “Don’t you remember what you

said last spring going down with me in the elevator?”

The “manager’s letter” also brings out whatever inconsistencies

there are in the demands made on a man by his superior and by the

company. Does the superior demand both speed and high quality when

he can get only one or the other? And what compromise is needed in

the interest of the company? Does he demand initiative and

judgment of his men but also that they check back with him before

they do anything? Does he ask for their ideas and suggestions but

never use them or discuss them? Does the company expect a small

engineering force to be available immediately whenever something

goes wrong in the plant, and yet bend all its efforts to the

completion of new designs? Does it expect a manager to maintain

high standards of performance but forbid him to remove poor

performers? Does it create the conditions under which people say,

I can get the work done as long as I can keep the boss from

knowing what I am doing?

These are common situations. They undermine spirit and

performance. The “manager’s letter” may not prevent them. But at

least it brings them out in the open, shows where compromises have

to be made, objectives have to be thought through, priorities have

to be established, behavior has to be changed.

As this device illustrates: managing managers requires special

efforts not only to establish common direction, but to eliminate

misdirection. Mutual understanding can never be attained by

“communications down,” can never be created by talking. It can

result only from “communications up.” It requires both the

superior’s willingness to listen and a tool especially designed to

make lower managers heard.

Self-control through Measurements

The greatest advantage of management by objectives is perhaps

that it makes it possible for a manager to control his own

performance. Self-control means stronger motivation: a desire to

do the best rather than just enough to get by. It means higher

performance goals and broader vision. Even if management by

objectives was not necessary to give the enterprise the unity of

direction and effort of a management team, it would be necessary

to make possible management by self-control.

Indeed, one of the major contributions of management by

objectives is that it enables us to substitute management by

self-control for management by domination.

That management by self-control is highly desirable will hardly

be disputed in America or in American business today. Its

acceptance underlies all the talk of “pushing decisions down to

the lowest possible level,” or of “paying people for results.” But

to make management by self-control a reality requires more than

acceptance of the concept as right and desirable. It requires new

tools and far-reaching changes in traditional thinking and

practices.

To be able to control his own performance, a manager needs to

know more than what his goals are. He must be able to measure his

performance and results against the goal. It should indeed be an

invariable practice to supply managers with clear and common

measurements in all key areas of a business. Those measurements

need not be rigidly quantitative; nor need they be exact. But they

have to be clear, simple, and rational. They have to be relevant

and direct attention and efforts where they should go. They have

to be reliable—at least to the point where their margin of error

is acknowledged and understood. And they have to be, so to speak,

self-announcing, understandable without complicated interpretation

or philosophical discussion.

Each manager should have the information he needs to measure

his own performance and should receive it soon enough to make any

changes necessary for the desired results. And this information

should go to the manager himself, and not to his superior. It

should be the means of self-control, not a tool of control from

above.

This needs particular stress today, when our ability to obtain

such information is growing rapidly as a result of technological

progress in information gathering, analysis, and synthesis. Up

till now information on important facts was either not obtainable

at all, or could be assembled only so late as to be of little but

historical interest. This former inability to produce measuring

information was not an unmixed curse. For while it made effective

self-control difficult, it also made difficult effective control

of a manager from above; in the absence of information with which

to control him, the manager had to be allowed to work as he saw

fit.

Our new ability to produce measuring information will make

possible effective self-control; and if so used, it will lead to a

tremendous advance in the effectiveness and performance of

management. But if this new ability is abused in order to impose

control on managers from above, the new technology will inflict

incalculable harm by demoralizing management, and by seriously

lowering the effectiveness of managers.

That information can be effectively used for self-control is

shown by the example of General Electric.

General Electric has a special control service—the traveling

auditors. The auditors study every one of the managerial units of

the company thoroughly at least once a year. But their report goes

to the manager of the unit studied. There can be little doubt that

the feeling of confidence and trust in the company that even

casual contact with General Electric managers reveals is directly

traceable to this practice of using information for self-control

rather than for control from above.

But the General Electric practice is by no means common or

generally understood. Typical management thinking is much closer

to the practice exemplified by a large chemical company.

In this company a control section audits every one of the

managerial units of the company. The results of the audits do not

go, however, to the managers audited. They go only to the

president, who then calls in the managers to confront them with

the audit of their operations. What this has done to morale is

shown in the nickname the company’s managers have given the

control section: “the president’s Gestapo.” Indeed, more and more

managers are now running their units not to obtain the best

performance but to obtain the best showing on the control-section

audits.

This should not be misunderstood as advocacy of low performance

standards or absence of control. On the contrary, management by

objectives and self-control is primarily a means to achieve

standards higher than are to be found in most companies today. And

every manager should be held strictly accountable for the results

of his performance.

But what he does to reach those results he—and only he—should

control. It should be clearly understood what behavior and methods

the company bars as unethical, unprofessional, or unsound. But

within these limits, every manager must be free to decide what he

has to do. And only if he has all the information regarding his

operations can he fully be held accountable for results.

The Proper Use of Reports and Procedures

Management by self-control requires complete rethinking

concerning our use of reports, procedures, and forms.

Reports and procedures are necessary tools. But few tools can

be so easily misused, and few can do as much damage. For reports

and procedures, when misused, cease to be tools and become

malignant masters.

There are three common misuses of reports and procedures. The

first is the all too common belief that procedures are instruments

of morality. They are not; their principle is exclusively that of

economy. They never decide what should be done, only how it might

be done most expeditiously. Problems of right conduct can never be

“proceduralized” (surely the most horrible word in the

bureaucrat’s jargon); conversely, right conduct can never be

established by procedure.

The second misuse is to consider procedures a substitute for

judgment. Procedures can work only where judgment is no longer

required, that is, in the repetitive situation for whose handling

the judgment has already been supplied and tested. Our

civilization suffers from a superstitious belief in the magical

effect of printed forms. And the superstition is most dangerous

when it leads us into trying to handle the exceptional, nonroutine

situation by procedure. In fact, it is the test of a good

procedure that it quickly identifies the situations that, even in

the most routine of processes, do not fit the pattern but require

special handling and decision based on judgment.

But the most common misuse of reports and procedures is as an

instrument of control from above. This is particularly true of

those that aim at supplying information to higher management—the

“forms” of everyday business life. The common case of the plant

manager who has to fill out twenty forms to supply accountants,

engineers, or staff people in the central office with information

he himself does not need, is only one of thousands of examples. As

a result, the man’s attention is directed away from his own job.

The things he is asked about or required to do for control

purposes come to appear to him as reflections of what the company

wants of him, become to him the essence of his job; while

resenting them, he tends to put effort into these things rather

than into his own job. Eventually, his boss, too, is misdirected,

if not hypnotized, by the procedure.

A large insurance company, a few years ago, started a big

program for the “improvement of management.” To this end it built

up a strong central-office organization concerned with such things

as renewal ratios, claims settlement, selling costs, sales

methods, etc. This organization did excellent work—top management

learned a lot about running an insurance company. But actual

performance has been going down ever since. For the managers in

the field spend more and more time filling out reports, less and

less doing their work. Worse still, they soon learned to

subordinate performance to a “good showing.” Not only did

performance go to pieces—morale suffered even more. Top management

and its staff experts came to be viewed by the field managers as

enemies to be outsmarted or at least kept as far away as possible.

Similar stories exist ad infinitum—in every industry and in

companies of every size. To some extent the situation is caused by

the fallacy of the “staff” concept. But, above all, it is the

result of the misuse of procedures as control.

Reports and procedures should be kept to a minimum, and used

only when they save time and labor. They should be as simple as

possible.

One of our leading company presidents tells the following story

on himself. Fifteen years ago he bought for his company a small

independent plant in Los Angeles. The plant had been making a

profit of $250,000 a year; and it was purchased on that basis.

When going through the plant with the owner—who stayed on as plant

manager—the president asked, “How do you determine your pricing?”

“That’s easy,” the former owner answered; “we just quote ten cents

per thousand less than your company does.” “And how do you control

your costs?” was the next question. “That’s easy,” was the answer;

“we know what we pay for raw materials and labor and what

production we ought to get for the money.” “And how do you control

your overhead?” was the final question. “We don’t bother about

it.”

Well, thought the president, we can certainly save a lot of

money here by introducing our thorough controls. But a year later

the profit of the plant was down to $125,000; sales had remained

the same and prices had remained the same; but the introduction of

complex procedures had eaten up half the profit.

Every business should regularly find out whether it needs all

the reports and procedures it uses. At least once every five

years, every form should be put on trial for its life. I once had

to recommend an even more drastic measure to clear up a situation

in which reports and forms, luxuriating like the Amazon rain

forest, threatened to choke the life out of an old established

utility company. I suggested that all reports be suspended

simultaneously for two months, and only those be allowed to return

that managers still demanded after living without them. This cut

reports and forms in the company by three quarters.

Reports and procedures should focus only on the performance

needed to achieve results in the key areas. To “control”

everything is to control nothing. And to attempt to control the

irrelevant always misdirects.

Finally, reports and procedures should be the tool of the man

who fills them out. They must never themselves become the measure

of his performance. A man must never be judged by the quality of

the production forms he fills out—unless he be the clerk in charge

of those forms. He must always be judged by his production

performance. And the only way to make sure of this is by having

him fill out no forms, make no reports, except those he needs

himself to achieve performance.

A Philosophy of Management

What the business enterprise needs is a principle of management

that will give full scope to individual strength and

responsibility, and at the same time give common direction of

vision and effort, establish team work, and harmonize the goals of

the individual with the commonweal.

The only principle that can do this is management by objectives

and self-control. It makes the commonweal the aim of every

manager. It substitutes for control from outside the stricter,

more exacting and more effective control from the inside. It

motivates the manager to action not because somebody tells him to

do something or talks him into doing it, but because the objective

needs of his task demand it. He acts not because somebody wants

him to but because he himself decides that he has to—he acts, in

other words, as a free man.

The word “philosophy” is tossed around with happy abandon these

days in management circles. I have even seen a dissertation,

signed by a vice president, on the “philosophy of handling

purchase requisitions” (as far as I could figure out, “philosophy”

here meant that purchase requisitions had to be in triplicate).

But management by objectives and self-control may legitimately be

called a “philosophy” of management. It rests on a concept of the

job of management. It rests on an analysis of the specific needs

of the management group and the obstacles it faces. It rests on a

concept of human action, human behavior, and human motivation.

Finally, it applies to every manager, whatever his level and

function, and to any business enterprise whether large or small.

It ensures performance by converting objective needs into personal

goals. And this is genuine freedom, freedom under the law.

9.

PICKING PEOPLE—

THE BASIC RULES

Executives spend more time on managing people and making people

decisions than on anything else, and they should. No other

decisions are so long-lasting in their consequences or so

difficult to unmake. And yet, by and large, executives make poor

promotion and staffing decisions. By all accounts, their batting

average is no better than .333: at most one-third of such

decisions turn out right; one-third are minimally effective; and

one-third are outright failures.

In no other area of management would we put up with such

miserable performance. Indeed, we need not and should not.

Managers making people decisions will never be perfect, of course.

But they should come pretty close to batting 1.000, especially

because in no other area of management do we know so much.

Some executives’ people decisions have, however, approached

perfection. At the time of Pearl Harbor, every single general

officer in the U.S. Army was overage. Although none of the younger

men had been tested in combat or in a significant troop command,

the United States came out of World War II with the largest corps

of competent general officers any army has ever had. General

George C. Marshall, the army’s chief of staff, had personally

chosen each man. Not all were great successes, but practically

none was an outright failure.

In the forty or so years during which he ran General Motors,

Alfred P. Sloan Jr. picked every GM executive—down to the

manufacturing managers, controllers, engineering managers, and

master mechanics at even the smallest accessory division. By

today’s standards, Sloan’s vision and values may seem narrow. They

were. He was concerned only with performance in and for GM.

Nonetheless, his long-term performance in placing people in the

right jobs was flawless.

The Basic Principles

There is no such thing as an infallible judge of people, at

least not on this side of the Pearly Gates. There are, however, a

few executives who take their people decisions seriously and work

at them.

Marshall and Sloan were about as different as two human beings

can be, but they followed, and quite consciously, much the same

principles in making people decisions.

1. If I put a person into a job and he or she does not perform,

I have made a mistake. I have no business blaming that person, no

business invoking the “Peter Principle,” no business complaining.

I have made a mistake.

2. The soldier has a right to competent command, was already an

old maxim at the time of Julius Caesar. It is the duty of managers

to make sure that the responsible people in their organizations

perform.

3. Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as

important as the decisions about people because they determine the

performance capacity of the organization. Therefore, I’d better

make these decisions well.

4. The one “don’t”: Don’t give new people major assignments,

for doing so only compounds the risks. Give this sort of

assignment to someone whose behavior and habits you know and who

has earned trust and credibility within your organization. Put a

high-level newcomer first into an established position where the

expectations are known and help is available.

The Decision Steps

Just as there are only a few basic principles, there are only a

few important steps to follow in making effective promotion and

staffing decisions.

1. Think through the assignment. Job descriptions may last a

long time. In one large manufacturing company, for example, the

job description for the position of division general manager has

hardly changed since the company began to decentralize thirty

years ago. Indeed, the job description for bishops in the Roman

Catholic Church has not changed at all since canon law was first

codified in the thirteenth century. But assignments change all the

time, and unpredictably.

Once in the early 1940s, I mentioned to Alfred Sloan that he

seemed to me to spend an inordinate amount of time pondering the

assignment of a fairly low-level job—general sales manager of a

small accessory division—before choosing among three equally

qualified candidates. “Look at the assignment the last few times

we had to fill the same job,” Sloan answered. To my surprise, I

found that the terms of the assignment were quite different on

each occasion.

When putting a man in as division commander during World War

II, George Marshall always looked first at the nature of the

assignment for the next eighteen months or two years. To raise a

division and train it is one assignment. To lead it in combat is

quite another. To take command of a division that has been badly

mauled and restore its morale and fighting strength is another

still.

When the task is to select a new regional sales manager, the

responsible executive must first know what the heart of the

assignment is: to recruit and train new salespeople because, say,

the present sales force is nearing retirement age? Or is it to

open up new markets because the company’s products, though doing

well with old-line industries in the region, have not been able to

penetrate new and growing markets? Or, because the bulk of sales

still comes from products that are twenty-five years old, is it to

establish a market presence for the company’s new products? Each

of these is a different assignment and requires a different kind

of person.

2. Look at a number of potentially qualified people. The

controlling word here is number. Formal qualifications are a

minimum for consideration; their absence disqualifies the

candidate automatically. Equally important, the person and the

assignment need to fit each other. To make an effective decision,

an executive should look at three to five qualified candidates.

3. Think hard about how to look at these candidates. If an

executive has studied the assignment, he or she understands what a

new person would need to do with high priority and concentrated

effort. The central question is not, What can this or that

candidate do or not do? It is, rather, What are the strengths each

possesses and are these the right strengths for the assignment?

Weaknesses are limitations, which may, of course, rule a candidate

out. For instance, a person may be excellently qualified for the

technical aspects of a job, but if the assignment requires above

all the ability to build a team and this ability is lacking, then

the fit is not right.

But effective executives do not start out by looking at

weaknesses. You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can

build only on strengths.

Both Marshall and Sloan were highly demanding men, but both

knew that what matters is the ability to do the assignment. If

that exists, the company can always supply the rest. If it does

not exist, the rest is useless.

If, for instance, a division needed an officer for a training

assignment, Marshall looked for people who could turn recruits

into soldiers. Usually every man who was good at this task had

serious weaknesses in other areas. One was not particularly

effective as a tactical commander and was positively hopeless when

it came to strategy. Another had foot-in-mouth disease and got

into trouble with the press. A third was vain, arrogant,

egotistical, and fought constantly with his commanding officer.

Never mind, could he train recruits? If the answer was yes—and

especially if the answer was “he’s the best”—he got the job.

In picking members of their cabinets, Franklin Roosevelt and

Harry Truman said, in effect, Never mind personal weaknesses. Tell

me first what each of them can do. It may not be coincidence that

these two Presidents had the strongest Cabinets in

twentieth-century U.S. history.

4. Discuss each of the candidates with several people who have

worked with them. One executive’s judgment alone is worthless.

Because all of us have first impressions, prejudices, likes, and

dislikes, we need to listen to what other people think. When the

military picks general officers or the Catholic Church picks

bishops, this kind of extensive discussion is a formal step in

their selection process. Competent executives do it informally.

Hermann Abs, the former head of Deutsche Bank, picked more

successful chief executives in recent times than anyone else. He

personally chose most of the top-level managers who pulled off the

postwar German “economic miracle,” and he checked out each of them

first with three or four of their former bosses or colleagues.

5. Make sure the appointee understands the job. After the

appointee has been in a new job for three or four months, he or

she should be focusing on the demands of that job rather than on

the requirements of preceding assignments. It is the executive’s

responsibility to call that person in and say, “You have now been

regional sales manager [or whatever] for three months. What do you

have to do to be a success in your new job? Think it through and

come back in a week or ten days and show me in writing. But I can

tell you one thing right away: the things you did to get the

promotion are almost certainly the wrong things to do now.”

If you do not follow this step, don’t blame the candidate for

poor performance. Blame yourself. You have failed in your duty as

a manager.

The largest single source of failed promotions—and I know of no

greater waste in U.S. management—is the failure to think through,

and help others think through, what a new job requires.

All too typical is the brilliant former student of mine who

telephoned a few months ago, almost in tears. “I got my first big

chance a year ago,” he said. “My company made me engineering

manager. Now they tell me that I’m through. And yet I’ve done a

better job than ever before. I have actually designed three

successful new products for which we’ll get patents.”

It is only human to say to ourselves, I must have done

something right or I would not have gotten the big new job.

Therefore, I had better do more of what I did to get the promotion

now that I have it. It is not intuitively obvious to most people

that a new and different job requires new and different behavior.

Almost fifty years ago, a boss of mine challenged me four months

after he had advanced me to a far more responsible position. Until

he called me in, I had continued to do what I had done before. To

his credit, he understood that it was his responsibility to make

me see that a new job means different behavior, a different focus,

and different relationships.

The High-Risk Decisions

Even if executives follow all these steps, some of their people

decisions will still fail. These are, for the most part, the

high-risk decisions that nevertheless have to be taken.

There is, for example, high risk in picking managers in

professional organizations—in a research lab, say, or an

engineering or corporate legal department. Professionals do not

readily accept as their boss someone whose credentials in the

field they do not respect. In choosing a manager of engineering,

the choices are therefore limited to the top-flight engineers in

the department. Yet there is no correlation (unless it be a

negative one) between performance as a bench engineer and

performance as a manager. Much the same is true when a

high-performing operating manager gets a promotion to a staff job

at headquarters or a staff expert moves into a line position.

Temperamentally, operating people are frequently unsuited to the

tensions, frustrations, and relationships of staff work, and vice

versa. The first-rate regional sales manager may well become

totally ineffective if promoted into market research, sales

forecasting, or pricing.

We do not know how to test or predict whether a person’s

temperament will be suited to a new environment. We can find this

out only by experience. If a move from one kind of work to another

does not pan out, the executive who made the decision has to

remove the misfit, and fast. But that executive also has to say, I

made a mistake, and it is my job to correct it. To keep misfits in

a job they cannot do is not being kind; it is being cruel. But

there is also no reason to let the person go. A company can always

use a good bench engineer, a good analyst, a good sales manager.

The proper course of action—and it works most times—is to offer

the misfit a return to the old job or an equivalent.

People decisions may also fail because a job has become what

New England ship captains 150 years ago called a “widow-maker.”

When a clipper ship, no matter how well designed and constructed,

began to have fatal “accidents,” the owners did not redesign or

rebuild the ship. They broke it up as fast as possible.

Widow-makers—that is, jobs that regularly defeat even good

people—appear most often when a company grows or changes fast. For

instance, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the job of “international

vice president” in U.S. banks became a widow-maker. It had always

been an easy job to fill. In fact, it had long been considered a

job into which banks could safely put also-rans and expect them to

perform well. Then, suddenly, the job began to defeat one new

appointee after another. What had happened, as hindsight now tells

us, was that international activity quickly and without warning

had become an integral part of the daily business of major banks

and their corporate customers. What had been until then an easy

job became, literally, a “nonjob” that nobody could do.

Whenever a job defeats two people in a row, who in their

earlier assignments had performed well, a company has a

widow-maker on its hands. When this happens, a responsible

executive should not ask the headhunter for a universal genius.

Instead abolish the job. Any job that ordinarily competent people

cannot perform is a job that cannot be staffed. Unless changed, it

will predictably defeat the third appointee the way it defeated

the first two.

Making the right people decisions is the ultimate means of

controlling an organization well. Such decisions reveal how

competent management is, what its values are, and whether it takes

its job seriously. No matter how hard managers try to keep their

decisions a secret—and some still try hard—people decisions cannot

be hidden. They are eminently visible.

Executives often cannot judge whether a strategic move is a

wise one. Nor are they necessarily interested. “I don’t know why

we are buying this business in Australia, but it won’t interfere

with what we are doing here in Fort Worth” is a common reaction.

But when the same executives read that “Joe Smith has been made

controller in the XYZ division,” they usually know Joe much better

than top management does. These executives should be able to say,

“Joe deserves the promotion; he is an excellent choice, just the

person that division needs to get the controls appropriate for its

rapid growth.”

If, however, Joe got promoted because he is a politician,

everybody will know it. They will all say to themselves, Okay,

that is the way to get ahead in this company. They will despise

their management for forcing them to become politicians but will

either quit or become politicians themselves in the end. As we

have known for a long time, people in organizations tend to be

influenced by the ways they see others being rewarded. And when

the rewards go to nonperformance, to flattery, or to mere

cleverness, the organization will soon decline into

nonperformance, flattery, or cleverness.

Executives who do not make the effort to get their people

decisions right do more than risk poor performance. They risk

their organization’s respect.

10.

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL BUSINESS

Big businesses don’t innovate, says the conventional wisdom.

This sounds plausible enough. True, the new, major innovations of

this century did not come out of the old, large businesses of

their time. The railroads did not spawn the automobile or the

truck; they did not even try. And though the automobile companies

did try (Ford and General Motors both pioneered in aviation and

aerospace), all of today’s large aircraft and aviation companies

have evolved out of separate new ventures. Similarly, today’s

giants of the pharmaceutical industry are, in the main, companies

that were small or nonexistent fifty years ago when the first

modern drugs were developed. Every one of the giants of the

electronics industry—General Electric, Westinghouse, and RCA in

the United States; Siemens and Philips on the Continent; Toshiba

in Japan—rushed into computers in the 1950s. Not one was

successful. The field is dominated by IBM, a company that was

barely middle-sized and most definitely not high-tech forty years

ago.

And yet the all but universal belief that large businesses do

not and cannot innovate is not even a half-truth; rather, it is a

misunderstanding.

In the first place, there are plenty of exceptions, plenty of

large companies that have done well as entrepreneurs and

innovators. In the United States, there is Johnson & Johnson in

hygiene and health care, and 3M in highly engineered products for

both industrial and consumer markets. Citibank, America’s and the

world’s largest nongovernmental financial institution, well over a

century old, has been a major innovator in many areas of banking

and finance. In Germany, Hoechst—one of the world’s largest

chemical companies, and more than 125 years old by now—has become

a successful innovator in the pharmaceutical industry.

Second, it is not true that “bigness” is an obstacle to

entrepreneurship and innovation. In discussions of

entrepreneurship, one hears a great deal about the “bureaucracy”

of big organizations and of their “conservatism.” Both exist, of

course, and they are serious impediments to entrepreneurship and

innovation—but to all other performance just as much. And yet the

record shows unambiguously that among existing enterprises,

whether business or public-sector institutions, the small ones are

least entrepreneurial and least innovative. Among existing

entrepreneurial businesses there are a great many very big ones;

the list above could have been enlarged without difficulty to one

hundred companies from all over the world, and a list of

innovative public-service institutions would also include a good

many large ones.

It is not size that is an impediment to entrepreneurship and

innovation; it is the existing operation itself, and especially

the existing successful operation. And it is easier for a big or

at least a fair-sized company to surmount this obstacle than it is

for a small one. Operating anything—a manufacturing plant, a

technology, a product line, a distribution system—requires

constant effort and unremitting attention. The one thing that can

be guaranteed in any kind of operation is the daily crisis. The

daily crisis cannot be postponed; it has to be dealt with right

away. And the existing operation demands high priority and

deserves it. The new always looks so small, so puny, so

unpromising next to the size and performance of maturity.

Where the conventional wisdom goes wrong is in its assumption

that entrepreneurship and innovation are natural, creative, or

spontaneous. If entrepreneurship and innovation do not well up in

an organization, something must be stifling them. That only a

minority of existing successful businesses are entrepreneurial and

innovative is thus seen as conclusive evidence that existing

businesses quench the entrepreneurial spirit. But entrepreneurship

is not “natural”; it is not “creative.” It is work. Hence, the

correct conclusion from the evidence is the opposite of the one

commonly reached. That a substantial number of existing

businesses, and among them a goodly number of fair-sized, big, and

very big ones, succeed as entrepreneurs and innovators indicates

that entrepreneurship and innovation can be achieved by any

business. But they must be consciously striven for. They can be

learned, but it requires effort. Entrepreneurial businesses treat

entrepreneurship as a duty. They are disciplined about it . . .

they work at it . . . they practice it.

Structures

People work within a structure.

For the existing business to be capable of innovation, it has

to create a structure that allows people to be entrepreneurial. It

has to devise relationships that center on entrepreneurship. It

has to make sure that its incentives, its compensation, personnel

decisions, and policies, all reward the right entrepreneurial

behavior and do not penalize it.

1. This means, first, that the entrepreneurial, the new, has to

be organized separately from the old and existing. Whenever we

have tried to make an existing unit the carrier of the

entrepreneurial project, we have failed.

One reason is that the existing business always requires time

and effort on the part of the people responsible for it, and

deserves the priority they give it. The new always looks so

puny—so unpromising—next to the reality of the massive, ongoing

business. The existing business, after all, has to nourish the

struggling innovation. But the “crisis” in today’s business has to

be attended to as well. The people responsible for an existing

business will therefore always be tempted to postpone action on

anything new, entrepreneurial, or innovative until it is too late.

No matter what has been tried—and we have now been trying every

conceivable mechanism for thirty or forty years—existing units

have been found to be capable mainly of extending, modifying, and

adapting what already is in existence. The new belongs elsewhere.

2. This means also that there has to be a special locus for the

new venture within the organization, and it has to be pretty high

up. Even though the new project, by virtue of its current size,

revenues, and markets, does not rank with existing products,

somebody in top management must have the specific assignment to

work on tomorrow as an entrepreneur and innovator.

This need not be a full-time job; in the smaller business, it

very often cannot be a full-time job. But it needs to be a clearly

defined job and one for which somebody with authority and prestige

is fully accountable.

The new project is an infant and will remain one for the

foreseeable future, and infants belong in the nursery. The

“adults,” that is, the executives in charge of existing businesses

or products, will have neither time nor understanding for the

infant project. They cannot afford to be bothered.

Disregard of this rule cost a major machine-tool manufacturer

its leadership in robotics.

The company had the basic patents on machine tools for

automated mass production. It had excellent engineering, an

excellent reputation, and first-rate manufacturing. Everyone in

the early years of factory automation—around 1975—expected it to

emerge as the leader. Ten years later it had dropped out of the

race entirely. The company had placed the unit charged with the

development of machine tools for automated production three or

four levels down in the organization, and had it report to people

charged with designing, making, and selling the company’s

traditional machine-tool lines. Those people were supportive; in

fact, the work on robotics had been mainly their idea. But they

were far too busy defending their traditional lines against a lot

of new competitors such as the Japanese, redesigning them to fit

new specifications, demonstrating, marketing, financing, and

servicing them. Whenever the people in charge of the “infant” went

to their bosses for a decision, they were told, “I have no time

now, come back next week.” Robotics were, after all, only a

promise; the existing machine-tool lines produced millions of

dollars each year.

Unfortunately, this is a common error.

The best, and perhaps the only, way to avoid killing off the

new by sheer neglect is to set up the innovative project from the

start as a separate business.

The best-known practitioners of this approach are three

American companies: Procter & Gamble—the soap, detergent, edible

oil, and food producer—a very large and aggressively

entrepreneurial company; Johnson & Johnson, the hygiene and

health-care supplier; and 3M, a major manufacturer of industrial

and consumer products. These three companies differ in the details

of practice but essentially all three have the same policy. They

set up the new venture as a separate business from the beginning

and put a project manager in charge. The project manager remains

in charge until the project is either abandoned or has achieved

its objective and become a full-fledged business. And until then,

the project manager can mobilize all the skills as they are

needed—research, manufacturing, finance, marketing—and put them to

work on the project team.

3. There is another reason why a new, innovative effort is best

set up separately: to keep away from it the burdens it cannot yet

carry. Both the investment in a new product line and its returns

should, for instance, not be included in the traditional

return-on-investment analysis until the product line has been on

the market for a number of years. To ask the fledgling development

to shoulder the full burdens an existing business imposes on its

units is like asking a six-year-old to go on a long hike carrying

a sixty-pound pack; neither will get very far. And yet the

existing business has requirements with respect to accounting, to

personnel policy, to reporting of all kinds, which it cannot

easily waive.

The innovative effort and the unit that carries it require

different policies, rules, and measurements in many areas.

I learned this many years ago in a major chemical company.

Everybody knew that one of its central divisions had to produce

new materials to stay in business. The plans for these materials

were there, the scientific work had been done . . . but nothing

happened. Every year there was another excuse. Finally, the

division’s general manager spoke up at a review meeting: “My

management group and I are compensated primarily on the basis of

return on investment. The moment we spend money on developing the

new materials, our return will go down by half for at least four

years. Even if I am still here in four years time when we should

show the first returns on these investments—and I doubt that the

company will put up with me that long if profits are that much

lower—I’m taking bread out of the mouths of all my associates in

the meantime. Is it reasonable to expect us to do this?” The

formula was changed and the developmental expenses for the new

project were taken out of the return-on-investment figures. Within

eighteen months the new materials were on the market. Two years

later they had given the division leadership in its field, which

it has retained to this day. Four years later the division doubled

its profits.

The Don’ts

There are some things the entrepreneurial management of an

existing business should not do.

1. The most important caveat is not to mix managerial units and

entrepreneurial ones. Do not ever put the entrepreneurial into the

existing managerial component. Do not make innovation an objective

for people charged with running, exploiting, optimizing what

already exists.

But it is also inadvisable—in fact, almost a guarantee of

failure—for a business to try to become entrepreneurial without

changing its basic policies and practices. To be an entrepreneur

on the side rarely works.

In the last ten or fifteen years a great many large American

companies have tried to go into joint ventures with entrepreneurs.

Not one of these attempts has succeeded; the entrepreneurs found

themselves stymied by policies, by basic rules, by a “climate”

they felt was bureaucratic, stodgy, reactionary. But at the same

time their partners, the people from the big company, could not

figure out what the entrepreneurs were trying to do and thought

them undisciplined, wild, visionary.

By and large, big companies have been successful as

entrepreneurs only if they use their own people to build the

venture. They have been successful only when they use people whom

they understand and who understand them, people whom they trust

and who in turn know how to get things done in the existing

business; people, in other words, with whom one can work as

partners. But this presupposes that the entire company is imbued

with the entrepreneurial spirit, that it wants innovation and is

reaching out for it, considering it both a necessity and an

opportunity. It presupposes that the entire organization has been

made “greedy for new things.”

2. Innovative efforts that take the existing business out of

its own field are rarely successful. Innovation had better not be

“diversification.” Whatever the benefits of diversification, it

does not mix with entrepreneurship and innovation. The new is

always sufficiently difficult not to attempt it in an area one

does not understand. An existing business innovates where it has

expertise, whether knowledge of market or knowledge of technology.

Anything new will predictably get into trouble, and then one has

to know the business. Diversification itself rarely works unless

it, too, is built on commonality with the existing business,

whether commonality of the market or commonality of the

technology. Even then, as I have discussed elsewhere,

diversification has its problems. But if one adds to the

difficulties and demands of diversification the difficulties and

demands of entrepreneurship, the result is predictable disaster.

So one innovates only where one understands.

3. Finally, it is almost always futile to avoid making one’s

own business entrepreneurial by “buying in,” that is, by acquiring

small entrepreneurial ventures. Acquisitions rarely work unless

the company that does the acquiring is willing and able within a

fairly short time to furnish management to the acquisition. The

managers that have come with the acquired company rarely stay

around very long. If they were owners, they have now become

wealthy; if they were professional managers, they are likely to

stay around only if given much bigger opportunities in the new,

acquiring company. So, within a year or two, the acquirer has to

furnish management to run the business that has been bought. This

is particularly true when a nonentrepreneurial company buys an

entrepreneurial one. The management people in the new acquired

venture soon find that they cannot work with the people in their

new parent company, and vice versa. I myself know of no case where

“buying in” has worked.

A business that wants to be able to innovate, wants to have a

chance to succeed and prosper in a time of rapid change, has to

build entrepreneurial management into its own system. It has to

adopt policies that create throughout the entire organization the

desire to innovate and the habits of entrepreneurship and

innovation. To be a successful entrepreneur, the existing

business, large or small, has to be managed as an entrepreneurial

business.

11.

THE NEW VENTURE

For the existing enterprise, whether business or public-service

institution, the controlling word in the term “entrepreneurial

management” is “entrepreneurial.” For the new venture, it is

“management.” In the existing business, it is the existing that is

the main obstacle to entrepreneurship. In the new venture, it is

its absence.

The new venture has an idea. It may have a product or a

service. It may even have sales, and sometimes quite a substantial

volume of them. It surely has costs. And it may have revenues and

even profits. What it does not have is a “business,” a viable,

operating, organized “present” in which people know where they are

going, what they are supposed to do, and what the results are or

should be. But unless a new venture develops into a new business

and makes sure of being “managed,” it will not survive no matter

how brilliant the entrepreneurial idea, how much money it

attracts, how good its products, or even how great the demand for

them.

Refusal to accept these facts destroyed every single venture

started by the nineteenth century’s greatest inventor, Thomas

Edison. Edison’s ambition was to be a successful businessman and

the head of a big company. He should have succeeded, for he was a

superb business planner. He knew exactly how an electric power

company had to be set up to exploit his invention of the light

bulb. He knew exactly how to get all the money he could possibly

need for his ventures. His products were immediate successes and

the demand for them practically insatiable. But Edison remained an

entrepreneur; or rather, he thought that “managing” meant being

the boss. He refused to build a management team. And so every one

of his four or five companies collapsed ignominiously once it got

to middle size, and was saved only by booting Edison himself out

and replacing him with professional management.

Entrepreneurial management in the new venture has four

requirements:

It requires, first, a focus on the market.

It requires, second, financial foresight, and especially

planning for cash flow and capital needs ahead.

It requires, third, building a top management team long before

the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually

afford one.

And finally, it requires of the founding entrepreneur a

decision in respect to his or her own role, area of work, and

relationships.

The Need for Market Focus

A common explanation for the failure of a new venture to live

up to its promise or even to survive at all is: “We were doing

fine until these other people came and took our market away from

us. We don’t really understand it. What they offered wasn’t so

very different from what we had.” Or one hears: “We were doing all

right, but these other people started selling to customers we’d

never even heard of and all of a sudden they had the market.”

When a new venture does succeed, more often than not it is in a

market other than the one it was originally intended to serve,

with products or services not quite those with which it had set

out, bought in large part by customers it did not even think of

when it started, and used for a host of purposes besides the ones

for which the products were first designed. If a new venture does

not anticipate this, organizing itself to take advantage of the

unexpected and unseen markets; if it is not totally

market-focused, if not market-driven, then it will succeed only in

creating an opportunity for a competitor.

A German chemist developed Novocain as the first local

anesthetic in 1905. But he could not get the doctors to use it;

they preferred total anesthesia (they only accepted Novocain

during World War I). But totally unexpectedly, dentists began to

use the stuff. Whereupon—or so the story goes—the chemist began to

travel up and down Germany making speeches against Novocain’s use

in dentistry. He had not designed it for that purpose!

That reaction was somewhat extreme, I admit. Still,

entrepreneurs know what their innovation is meant to do. And if

some other use for it appears, they tend to resent it. They may

not actually refuse to serve customers they have not “planned”

for, but they are likely to make it clear that those customers are

not welcome.

This is what happened with the computer. The company that had

the first computer, Univac, knew that its magnificent machine was

designed for scientific work. And so it did not even send a

salesman out when a business showed interest in it; surely, it

argued, these people could not possibly know what a computer was

all about. IBM was equally convinced that the computer was an

instrument for scientific work: their own computer had been

designed specifically for astronomical calculations. But IBM was

willing to take orders from businesses and to serve them. Ten

years later, around 1960, Univac still had by far the most

advanced and best machine. IBM had the computer market.

The textbook prescription for this problem is “market

research.” But it is the wrong prescription.

One cannot do market research for something genuinely new. One

cannot do market research for something that is not yet on the

market. Similarly, several companies who turned down the Xerox

patents did so on the basis of thorough market research, which

showed that printers had no use at all for a copier. Nobody had

any inkling that businesses, schools, universities, colleges, and

a host of private individuals would want to buy a copier.

The new venture therefore needs to start out with the

assumption that its product or service may find customers in

markets no one thought of, for uses no one envisaged when the

product or service was designed, and that it will be bought by

customers outside its field of vision and even unknown to the new

venture.

To build market focus into a new venture is not in fact

particularly difficult. But what is required runs counter to the

inclinations of the typical entrepreneur. It requires, first, that

the new venture systematically hunt out both the unexpected

success and the unexpected failure. Rather than dismiss the

unexpected as an “exception,” as entrepreneurs are inclined to do,

they need to go out and look at it carefully and as a distinct

opportunity.

Shortly after World War II, a small Indian engineering firm

bought the license to produce a European-designed bicycle with an

auxiliary light engine. It looked like an ideal product for India;

yet it never did well. The owner of this small firm noticed,

however, that substantial orders came in for the engines alone. At

first he wanted to turn down those orders; what could anyone

possibly do with such a small engine? It was curiosity alone that

made him go to the actual area the orders came from. There he

found farmers who were taking the engines off the bicycles and

using them to power irrigation pumps that hitherto had been

hand-operated. This manufacturer is now the world’s largest maker

of small irrigation pumps, selling them by the millions. His pumps

have revolutionized farming all over Southeast Asia.

It does not require a great deal of money to find out whether

an unexpected interest from an unexpected market is an indication

of genuine potential or a fluke. It requires sensitivity and a

little systematic work.

Above all, the people who are running a new venture need to

spend time outside: in the marketplace, with customers and with

their own salespeople, looking and listening. The new venture

needs to build in systematic practices to remind itself that a

“product” or a “service” is defined by the customer, not by the

producer. It needs to work continually on challenging itself in

respect to the utility and value that its products or services

contribute to customers.

The greatest danger for the new venture is to “know better”

than the customer what the product or service is or should be, how

it should be bought, and what it should be used for. Above all,

the new venture needs willingness to see the unexpected success as

an opportunity rather than as an affront to its expertise. And it

needs to accept that elementary axiom of marketing: Businesses are

not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.

Financial Foresight

Lack of market focus is typically a disease of the “neonatal,”

the infant new venture. It is the most serious affliction of the

new venture in its early stages—and one that can permanently stunt

even those that survive.

The lack of adequate financial focus and of the right financial

policies is, by contrast, the greatest threat to the new venture

in the next stage of its growth. It is, above all, a threat to the

rapidly growing new venture. The more successful a new venture is,

the more dangerous the lack of financial foresight.

Suppose that a new venture has successfully launched its

product or service and is growing fast. It reports “rapidly

increasing profits” and issues rosy forecasts. The stock market

then “discovers” the new venture, especially if it is high-tech or

in a field otherwise currently fashionable. Predictions abound

that the new venture’s sales will reach a billion dollars within

five years. Eighteen months later the new venture collapses. It

may not go out of existence or go bankrupt. But it is suddenly

awash in red ink, lays off 180 of its 275 employees, fires the

president, or is sold at a bargain price to a big company. The

causes are always the same: lack of cash; inability to raise the

capital needed for expansion; and loss of control, with expenses,

inventories, and receivables in disarray. These three financial

afflictions often hit together at the same time. Yet any one of

them is enough to endanger the health, if not the life, of the new

venture.

Once this financial crisis has erupted, it can be cured only

with great difficulty and considerable suffering. But it is

eminently preventable.

Entrepreneurs starting new ventures are rarely unmindful of

money; on the contrary, they tend to be greedy. They therefore

focus on profits. But this is the wrong focus for a new venture,

or rather, it should come last rather than first. Cash flow,

capital, and controls should be emphasized in the early stages.

Without them, the profit figures are fiction—good for twelve to

eighteen months, perhaps, after which they evaporate.

Growth has to be fed. In financial terms this means that growth

in a new venture demands adding financial resources rather than

taking them out. Growth needs more cash and more capital. If the

growing new venture shows a “profit,” it is a fiction: a

bookkeeping entry put in only to balance the accounts. And since

taxes are payable on this fiction in most countries, it creates a

liability and a cash drain rather than “surplus.” The healthier a

new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it

requires. The new ventures that are the darlings of the newspapers

and the stock market newsletters, the new ventures that show rapid

profit growth and “record profits,” are those most likely to run

into desperate trouble a couple of years later.

The new venture needs cash-flow analysis, cash-flow forecasts,

and cash management. The fact that America’s new ventures of the

last few years (with the significant exception of high-tech

companies) have been doing so much better than new ventures used

to do is largely because the new entrepreneurs in the United

States have learned that entrepreneurship demands financial

management.

Cash management is fairly easy if there are reliable cash-flow

forecasts, with “reliable,” meaning “worst case,” assumptions

rather than hopes. There is an old banker’s rule of thumb,

according to which in forecasting cash income and cash outlays one

assumes that bills will have to be paid sixty days earlier than

expected and receivables will come in sixty days later. If the

forecast is overly conservative, the worst that can happen—it

rarely does in a growing new venture—is a temporary cash surplus.

A growing new venture should know twelve months ahead of time

how much cash it will need, when, and for what purposes. With a

year’s lead time, it is almost always possible to finance cash

needs. But even if a new venture is doing well, raising cash in a

hurry and in a “crisis” is never easy and always prohibitively

expensive. Above all, it always sidetracks the key people in the

company at the most critical time. For several months they then

spend their time and energy running from one financial institution

to another and cranking out one set of questionable financial

projections after another. In the end, they usually have to

mortgage the long-range future of the business to get through a

ninety-day cash bind. When they finally are able again to devote

time and thought to the business, they have irrevocably missed the

major opportunities. For the new venture, almost by definition, is

under cash pressure when the opportunities are greatest.

The successful new venture will also outgrow its capital

structure. A rule of thumb with a good deal of empirical evidence

to support it says that a new venture outgrows its capital base

with every increase in sales (or billings) of the order of 40 to

50 percent. After such growth, a new venture also needs a new and

different capital structure, as a rule. As the venture grows,

private sources of funds, whether from the owners and their

families or from outsiders, become inadequate. The company has to

find access to much larger pools of money by going “public,” by

finding a partner or partners among established companies, or by

raising money from insurance companies and pension funds. A new

venture that had been financed by equity money now needs to shift

to long-term debt, or vice versa. As the venture grows, the

existing capital structure always becomes the wrong structure and

an obstacle.

Finally, the new venture needs to plan the financial system it

requires to manage growth. Again and again, a growing new venture

starts off with an excellent product, excellent standing in its

market, and excellent growth prospects. Then suddenly everything

goes out of control: receivables, inventory, manufacturing costs,

administrative costs, service, distribution, everything. Once one

area gets out of control, all of them do. The enterprise has

outgrown its control structure. By the time control has been

reestablished, markets have been lost, customers have become

disgruntled if not hostile, distributors have lost their

confidence in the company. Worst of all, employees have lost trust

in management, and with good reason.

Fast growth always makes obsolete the existing controls. Again,

a growth of 40 to 50 percent in volume seems to be the critical

figure.

Once control has been lost, it is hard to recapture. Yet the

loss of control can be prevented quite easily. What is needed is

first to think through the critical areas in a given enterprise.

In one, it may be product quality; in another, service; in a

third, receivables and inventory; in a fourth, manufacturing

costs. Rarely are there more than four or five critical areas in

any given enterprise. (Managerial and administrative overhead

should, however, always be included. A disproportionate and fast

increase in the percentage of revenues absorbed by managerial and

administrative overhead, which means that the enterprise hires

managerial and administrative people faster than it actually

grows, is usually the first sign that a business is getting out of

control, that its management structure and practices are no longer

adequate to the task.)

To live up to its growth expectations, a new venture must

establish today the controls in these critical areas it will need

three years hence. Elaborate controls are not necessary nor does

it matter that the figures are only approximate. What matters is

that the management of the new venture is aware of these critical

areas, is being reminded of them, and can thus act fast if the

need arises. Disarray normally does not appear if there is

adequate attention to the key areas. Then the new venture will

have the controls it needs when it needs them.

Financial foresight does not require a great deal of time. It

does require a good deal of thought, however. The technical tools

to do the job are easily available; they are spelled out in most

texts on managerial accounting. But the work will have to be done

by the enterprise itself.

Building a Top Management Team

The new venture has successfully established itself in the

right market and has then successfully found the financial

structure and the financial system it needs. Nonetheless, a few

years later it is still prone to run into a serious crisis. Just

when it appears to be on the threshold of becoming an “adult”—a

successful, established, going concern—it gets into trouble nobody

seems to understand. The products are first-rate, the prospects

are excellent, and yet the business simply cannot grow. Neither

profitability nor quality, nor any of the other major areas

performs.

The reason is always the same: a lack of top management. The

business has outgrown being managed by one person, or even two

people, and it now needs a management team at the top. If it does

not have one already in place at the time, it is very late—in

fact, usually too late. The best one can then hope is that the

business will survive. But it is likely to be permanently crippled

or to suffer wounds that will bleed for many years to come. Morale

has been shattered and employees throughout the company are

disillusioned and cynical. And the people who founded the business

and built it almost always end up on the outside, embittered and

disenchanted.

The remedy is simple: to build a top management team before the

venture reaches the point where it must have one. Teams cannot be

formed overnight. They require long periods before they can

function. Teams are based on mutual trust and mutual

understanding, and this takes years to build up. In my experience,

three years is about the minimum.

But the small and growing new venture cannot afford a top

management team; it cannot sustain half a dozen people with big

titles and corresponding salaries. In fact, in the small and

growing business, a very small number of people do everything as

it comes along. How, then, can one square this circle?

Again, the remedy is relatively simple. But it does require the

will on the part of the founders to build a team rather than to

keep on running everything themselves. If one or two people at the

top believe that they, and they alone, must do everything, then a

management crisis a few months, or at the latest, a few years down

the road becomes inevitable.

Whenever the objective economic indicators of a new

venture—market surveys, for instance, or demographic

analysis—indicate that the business may double within three or

five years, then it is the duty of the founder or founders to

build the management team the new venture will very soon require.

This is preventive medicine, so to speak.

First of all, the founders, together with other key people in

the firm, will have to think through the key activities of their

business. What are the specific areas upon which the survival and

success of this particular business depend? Most of the areas will

be on everyone’s list. But if there are divergencies and

dissents—and there should be on a question as important as

this—they should be taken seriously. Every activity that any

member of the group thinks belongs there should go down on the

list.

The key activities are not to be found in books. They emerge

from analysis of the specific enterprise. Two enterprises that to

an outsider appear to be in an identical line of business may well

end up defining their key activities quite differently. One, for

instance, may put production in the center; the other, customer

service. Only two key activities are always present in any

organization: there is always the management of people and there

is always the management of money. The rest has to be determined

by the people within looking at the enterprise and at their own

jobs, values, and goals.

The next step is, then, for each member of the group, beginning

with the founder, to ask: “What are the activities that I am doing

well? And what are the activities that each of my key associates

in this business is actually doing well?” Again, there is going to

be agreement on most of the people and on most of their strengths.

But, again, any disagreement should be taken seriously.

Next, one asks: “Which of the key activities should each of us,

therefore, take on as his or her first and major responsibility

because they fit the individual’s strengths? Which individual fits

which key activity?”

Then the work on building a team can begin. The founder starts

to discipline himself (or herself) not to handle people and their

problems, if this is not the key activity that fits him best.

Perhaps this individual’s key strength is new products and new

technology. Perhaps this individual’s key activity is operations,

manufacturing, physical distribution, service. Or perhaps it is

money and finance and someone else had better handle people. But

all key activities need to be covered by someone who has proven

ability in performance.

There is no rule that says, A chief executive has to be in

charge of this or that. Of course, a chief executive is the court

of last resort and has ultimate accountability. And the chief

executive also has to make sure of getting the information

necessary to assume this ultimate accountability. The chief

executive’s own work, however, depends on what the enterprise

requires and on who the individual is. As long as the CEO’s work

program consists of key activities, he or she does a CEO’s job.

But the CEO also is responsible for making sure that all the other

key activities are adequately covered.

Finally, goals and objectives for each area need to be set.

Everyone who takes on the primary responsibility for a key

activity, whether product development or people, or money, must be

asked: “What can this enterprise expect of you? What should we

hold you accountable for? What are you trying to accomplish and by

what time?” But this is elementary management, of course.

It is prudent to establish the top management team informally

at first. There is no need to give people titles in a new and

growing venture, or to make announcements, or even to pay extra.

All this can wait a year or so, until it is clear that the new

setup works, and how. In the meantime, all the members of the team

have much to learn: their job, how they work together, and what

they have to do to enable the CEO and their colleagues to do their

jobs. Two or three years later, when the growing venture needs a

top management team, it has one.

However, should it fail to provide for a top management

structure before it actually needs one, it will lose the capacity

to manage itself long before it actually needs to. The founder

will have become so overloaded that important tasks will not get

done. At that point the company can go one of two ways. The first

possibility is that the founder concentrates only on the one or

two areas that fit his or her abilities and interests. Although

those are key areas, they are not the only crucial ones, and no

one will be left to look after the business’s other vital areas.

Two years later those will have been slighted and the business

will be in dire straits. The other, worse, possibility is that the

founder is in fact conscientious. He knows that people and money

are key areas of concern and need to be taken care of. However,

his own abilities and interests, which actually built the

business, are in the design and development of new products; but

being conscientious, he forces himself to focus on people and

finance. Since he is not very gifted in either area, he does

poorly in both. It also takes him forever to reach decisions or to

do any work in these areas, so that he is forced, by lack of time,

to neglect what he is really good at and what the company depends

on him for, the development of new technology and new products.

Three years later the company will have become an empty shell

without the products it needs, but also without the management of

people and the management of money it needs.

In the first example, it may be possible to save the company.

After all, it has the products. But the founder will inevitably be

removed by whoever comes in to salvage the company. In the second

case, the company usually cannot be saved at all and has to be

sold or liquidated.

Long before it has reached the point where it needs the balance

of a top management team, the new venture has to create one. Long

before the time has come at which management by one person no

longer works and becomes mismanagement, that one person also has

to start learning how to work with colleagues, has to learn to

trust people, yet also how to hold them accountable. The founder

has to learn to become the leader of a team rather than a “star”

with “helpers.”

“Where Can I Contribute?”

Building a top management team may be the single most important

step toward entrepreneurial management in the new venture. It is

only the first step, however, for the founders themselves, who

then have to think through what their own future is to be.

As a new venture develops and grows, the roles and

relationships of the original entrepreneurs inexorably change. If

the founders refuse to accept this, they will stunt the business

and may even destroy it.

Every founder-entrepreneur nods to this and says, “Amen.”

Everyone has horror stories of other founder-entrepreneurs who did

not change as the venture changed, and who then destroyed both the

business and themselves. But even among the founders who can

accept that they themselves need to do something, few know how to

tackle changing their own roles and relationships. They tend to

begin by asking, “What do I like to do?” Or at best, “Where do I

fit in?” The right question to start with is, “What will the

venture need objectively by way of management from here on out?”

And in a growing new venture, the founder has to ask that question

whenever the business (or the public-service institution) grows

significantly or changes direction or character, that is, changes

its products, services, markets, or the kind of people it needs.

The next questions the founder must ask are: “What am I good

at? What, of all these needs of the venture, could I supply, and

supply with distinction?” Only after having thought through those

two questions should a founder then ask: “What do I really want to

do, and believe in doing? What am I willing to spend years on, if

not the rest of my life? Is this something the venture really

needs? Is it a major, essential, indispensable contribution?”

But the questions of what a venture needs, what the strengths

of the founder-entrepreneur are, and what he or she wants to do

might be answered quite differently.

Edwin Land, for instance, the man who invented Polaroid glass

and the Polaroid camera, ran the company during the first twelve

or fifteen years of its life, until the early 1950s. Then it began

to grow fast. Land thereupon designed a top management team and

put it in place. As for himself, he decided that he was not the

right man for the top management job in the company: what he and

he alone could contribute was scientific innovation. Accordingly,

Land built himself a laboratory and established himself as the

company’s consulting director for basic research. The company

itself, in its day-to-day operations, was left to others to run.

Ray Kroc, the man who conceived and built McDonald’s, reached a

similar conclusion. He remained president until he died well past

the age of eighty. But he put a top management team in place to

run the company and appointed himself the company’s “marketing

conscience.” Until shortly before his death, he visited two or

three McDonald’s restaurants each week, carefully checking their

food quality, the level of cleanliness and friendliness and so on.

Above all, he looked at the customers, talked to them, and

listened to them. This enabled the company to make the necessary

changes to retain its leadership in the fast-food industry.

These questions may not always lead to such happy endings. They

may even lead to the decision to leave the company.

In one of the most successful new financial services ventures

in the United States, that is what the founder concluded. He did

establish a top management team. He asked what the company needed.

He looked at himself and his strengths, and he found no match

between the needs of the company and his own abilities, let alone

between the needs of the company and the things he wanted to do.

“I trained my own successor for about eighteen months, then turned

the company over to him and resigned,” he said. Since then he has

started three new businesses, not one of them in finance, has

developed them successfully to medium size, and then quit again.

He wants to develop new businesses but does not enjoy running

them. He accepts that both the businesses and he are better off

divorced from one another.

Other entrepreneurs in this same situation might reach

different conclusions. The founder of a well-known medical clinic,

a leader in its particular field, faced a similar dilemma. The

needs of the institution were for an administrator and

money-raiser. His own inclinations were to be a researcher and a

clinician. But he realized that he was good at raising money and

capable of learning to be the chief executive officer of a fairly

large health-care organization. “And so,” he says, “I felt it my

duty to the venture I had created, and to my associates in it, to

suppress my own desires and to take on the job of chief

administrator and money-raiser. But I would never have done so had

I not known that I had the abilities to do the job, and if my

advisers and my board had not all assured me that I had these

abilities.”

The question Where do I belong? needs to be faced up to and

thought through by the founder-entrepreneur as soon as the venture

shows the first signs of success. But the question can be faced up

to much earlier. Indeed, it might be best thought through before

the new venture is even started.

That is what Soichiro Honda, the founder and builder of Honda

Motor Company in Japan, did when he decided to open a small

business in the darkest days after Japan’s defeat in World War II.

He did not start his venture until he had found the right man to

be his partner and to run administration, finance, distribution,

marketing, sales, and personnel. For Honda had decided from the

outset that he belonged in engineering and production and would

not run anything else. That decision made the Honda Motor Company.

There is an earlier and even more instructive example, that of

Henry Ford. When Ford decided in 1903 to go into business for

himself, he did exactly what Honda did forty years later: before

starting, he found the right man to be his partner and to run the

areas where Ford knew he did not belong—administration, finance,

distribution, marketing, sales, and personnel. Like Honda, Henry

Ford knew that he belonged in engineering and manufacturing and

was going to confine himself to those two areas. The man he found,

James Couzens, contributed as much as Ford to the success of the

company. Many of the best-known policies and practices of the Ford

Motor Company for which Henry Ford is often given credit—the

famous five-dollar-a-day wage of 1913, or the pioneering

distribution and service policies, for example—were Couzens’s

ideas and at first resisted by Ford. So effective did Couzens

become that Ford grew increasingly jealous of him and forced him

out in 1917. The last straw was Couzens’s insistence that the

Model T was obsolescent and his proposal to use some of the huge

profits of the company to start work on a successor.

The Ford Motor Company grew and prospered to the very day of

Couzens’s resignation. Within a few short months thereafter, as

soon as Henry Ford had taken every single top management function

into his own hands, forgetting that he had known earlier where he

belonged, the Ford Motor Company began its long decline. Henry

Ford clung to the Model T for a full ten years, until it had

become literally unsalable. And the company’s decline was not

reversed until thirty years after Couzens’s dismissal when, with

his grandfather dying, a very young Henry Ford II took over the

practically bankrupt business.

The Need for Outside Advice

These last cases point up an important factor for the

entrepreneur in the new and growing venture, the need for

independent, objective outside advice.

The growing new venture may not need a formal board of

directors. Moreover, the typical board of directors very often

does not provide the advice and counsel the founder needs. But the

founder does need people with whom he can discuss basic decisions

and to whom he listens. Such people are rarely to be found within

the enterprise. Somebody has to challenge the founder’s appraisal

of the needs of the venture, and of his own personal strengths.

Someone who is not a part of the problem has to ask questions, to

review decisions, and above all, to push constantly to have the

long-term survival needs of the new venture satisfied by building

in the market focus, supplying financial foresight, and creating a

functioning top management team. This is the final requirement of

entrepreneurial management in the new venture.

The new venture that builds such entrepreneurial management

into its policies and practices will become a flourishing large

business.

In so many new ventures, especially high-tech ventures, the

techniques discussed in this chapter are spurned and even

despised. The argument is that they constitute “management” and

“We are entrepreneurs.” But this is not informality; it is

irresponsibility. It confuses manners and substance. It is old

wisdom that there is no freedom except under the law. Freedom

without law is license, which soon degenerates into anarchy, and

shortly thereafter into tyranny. It is precisely because the new

venture has to maintain and strengthen the entrepreneurial spirit

that it needs foresight and discipline. It needs to prepare itself

for the demands its own success will make of it. Above all, it

needs responsibility—and this, in the last analysis, is what

entrepreneurial management supplies to the new venture.

12.

ENTREPRENEURIAL STRATEGIES

Just as entrepreneurship requires entrepreneurial management,

that is, practices and policies within the enterprise, so it

requires practices and policies outside, in the marketplace. It

requires entrepreneurial strategies.

Of late, “strategy in business” has become the “in” word, with

any number of books written about it. However, I have not come

across any discussion of entrepreneurial strategies. Yet they are

important; they are distinct; and they are different.

There are four specifically entrepreneurial strategies.

1. “Being fustest with the mostest”

2. “Hitting them where they ain’t”

3. Finding and occupying a specialized “ecological niche”

4. Changing the economic characteristics of a product, a

market, or an industry

These four strategies are not mutually exclusive. One and the

same entrepreneur often combines elements of two, sometimes even

three, in one strategy. They are also not always sharply

differentiated; the same strategy might, for instance, be

classified as “hitting them where they ain’t” or “finding and

occupying a specialized ‘ecological niche.’” Still, each of these

four has its prerequisites. Each fits certain kinds of innovation

and does not fit others. Each requires specific behavior on the

part of the entrepreneur. Finally, each has its own limitations

and carries its own risks.

“Being Fustest with the Mostest”

“Being fustest with the mostest” was how a Confederate cavalry

general in America’s Civil War explained consistently winning his

battles. In this strategy the entrepreneur aims at leadership, if

not at dominance of a new market or a new industry. “Being fustest

with the mostest” does not necessarily aim at creating a big

business right away, though often this is indeed the aim. But it

aims from the start at a permanent leadership position.

“Being fustest with the mostest” is the approach that many

people consider the entrepreneurial strategy par excellence.

Indeed, if one were to go by the popular books on entrepreneurs,

one would conclude that “being fustest with the mostest” is the

only entrepreneurial strategy—and a good many entrepreneurs,

especially the high-tech ones, seem to be of the same opinion.

They are wrong, however. To be sure, a good many entrepreneurs

have indeed chosen this strategy. Yet “being fustest with the

mostest” is not even the dominant entrepreneurial strategy, let

alone the one with the lowest risk or the highest success ratio.

On the contrary, of all entrepreneurial strategies it is the

greatest gamble. And it is unforgiving, making no allowances for

mistakes and permitting no second chance.

But if successful, “being fustest with the mostest” is highly

rewarding.

Here are some examples to show what this strategy consists of

and what it requires.

Hoffmann-LaRoche of Basel, Switzerland, has for many years been

the world’s largest and in all probability its most profitable

pharmaceutical company. But its origins were quite humble: until

the mid-1920s, Hoffmann-LaRoche was a small and struggling

manufacturing chemist, making a few textile dyes. It was totally

overshadowed by the huge German dye-stuff makers and two or three

much bigger chemical firms in its own country. Then it gambled on

the newly discovered vitamins at a time when the scientific world

still could not quite accept that such substances existed. It

acquired the vitamin patents—nobody else wanted them. It hired the

discoverers away from Zurich University at several times the

salaries they could hope to get as professors, salaries even

industry had never paid before. And it invested all the money it

had and all it could borrow in manufacturing and marketing these

new substances.

Sixty years later, long after all vitamin patents have expired,

Hoffmann-LaRoche has nearly half the world’s vitamin market, now

amounting to billions of dollars a year.

Du Pont followed the same strategy. When it came up with nylon,

the first truly synthetic fiber, after fifteen years of hard,

frustrating research, Du Pont at once mounted massive efforts,

built huge plants, went into mass advertising—the company had

never before had consumer products to advertise—and created the

industry we now call plastics.

Not every “being fustest with the mostest” strategy needs to

aim at creating a big business, though it must always aim at

creating a business that dominates its market. The 3M Company in

St. Paul, Minnesota, does not—as a matter of deliberate policy, it

seems—attempt an innovation that might result in a big business by

itself. Nor does Johnson & Johnson, the health-care and hygiene

producer. Both companies are among the most fertile and most

successful innovators. Both look for innovations that will lead to

medium-sized rather than to giant enterprises, which are, however,

dominant in their markets.

Perhaps because “being fustest with the mostest” must aim at

creating something truly new, something truly different,

nonexperts and outsiders seem to do as well as the experts, in

fact, often better. Hoffmann-LaRoche, for instance, did not owe

its strategy to chemists, but to a musician who had married the

granddaughter of the company’s founder and needed more money to

support his orchestra than the company then provided through its

meager dividends. To this day the company has never been managed

by chemists, but always by financial men who have made their

career in a major Swiss bank.

The strategy of “being fustest with the mostest” has to hit

right on target or it misses altogether. Or, to vary the metaphor,

“being fustest with the mostest” is very much like a moon shot: a

deviation of a fraction of a minute of the arc and the missile

disappears into outer space. And once launched, the “being fustest

with the mostest” strategy is difficult to adjust or to correct.

To use this strategy, in other words, requires thought and

careful analysis. The “entrepreneur” who dominates so much of the

popular literature or who is portrayed in Hollywood movies, the

person who suddenly has a “brilliant idea” and rushes off to put

it into effect, is not going to succeed with it.

There has to be one clear-cut goal and all efforts have to be

focused on it. And when those efforts begin to produce results,

the innovator has to be ready to mobilize resources massively.

Then, after the innovation has become a successful business,

the work really begins. Then the strategy of “being fustest with

the mostest” demands substantial and continuing efforts to retain

a leadership position; otherwise, all one has done is create a

market for a competitor. The innovator has to run even harder now

that he has leadership than he ran before and to continue his

innovative efforts on a very large scale. The research budget must

be higher after the innovation has successfully been accomplished

than it was before. New uses have to be found; new customers must

be identified, and persuaded to try the new materials. Above all,

the entrepreneur who has succeeded in “being fustest with the

mostest” has to make his product or his process obsolete before a

competitor can do it. Work on the successor to the successful

product or process has to start immediately, with the same

concentration of effort and the same investment of resources that

led to the initial success.

Finally, the entrepreneur who has attained leadership by “being

fustest with the mostest” has to be the one who systematically

cuts the price of his own product or process. To keep prices high

simply holds an umbrella over potential competitors and encourages

them.

The strategy of “being fustest with the mostest” is indeed so

risky that an entire major strategy is based on the assumption

that “being fustest with the mostest” will fail far more often

than it can possibly succeed. It will fail because the will is

lacking. It will fail because efforts are inadequate. It will fail

because, despite successful innovation, not enough resources are

deployed, are available, or are being put to work to exploit

success, and so on. While the strategy is indeed highly rewarding

when successful, it is much too risky and much too difficult to be

used for anything but major innovations.

In most cases alternative strategies are available and

preferable—not primarily because they carry less risk, but because

for most innovations the opportunity is not great enough to

justify the cost, the effort, and the investment of resources

required for the “being fustest with the mostest” strategy.

Creative Imitation

Two completely different entrepreneurial strategies were summed

up by another battle-winning Confederate general in America’s

Civil War, who said, “Hit them where they ain’t.” They might be

called creative imitation and entrepreneurial judo, respectively.

Creative imitation is clearly a contradiction in terms. What is

creative must surely be original. And if there is one thing

imitation is not, it is “original.” Yet the term fits. It

describes a strategy that is “imitation” in its substance. What

the entrepreneur does is something somebody else has already done.

But it is “creative” because the entrepreneur applying the

strategy of “creative imitation” understands what the innovation

represents better than the people who made it and who innovated.

The foremost practitioner of this strategy and the most

brilliant one is IBM. And the Japanese Hattori Company, whose

Seiko watches have become the world’s leader, also owes its

domination of the market to creative imitation.

In the early 1930s, IBM built a high-speed calculating machine

to do calculations for the astronomers at New York’s Columbia

University. A few years later it built a machine that was already

designed as a computer—again, to do astronomical calculations,

this time at Harvard. And by the end of World War II, IBM had

built a real computer—the first one, by the way, that had the

features of the true computer: a “memory” and the capacity to be

“programmed.” And yet there are good reasons why the history books

pay scant attention to IBM as a computer innovator. For as soon as

it had finished its advanced 1945 computer—the first computer to

be shown to a lay public in its showroom in midtown New York,

where it drew immense crowds—IBM abandoned its own design and

switched to the design of its rival, the ENIAC developed at the

University of Pennsylvania. The ENIAC was far better suited to

business applications such as payroll, only its designers did not

see this. IBM structured the ENIAC so that it could be

manufactured and serviced and could do mundane “number crunching.”

When IBM’s version of the ENIAC came out in 1953, it at once set

the standard for commercial, multipurpose, mainframe computers.

This is the strategy of “creative imitation.” It waits until

somebody else has established the new, but only “approximately.”

Then it goes to work. And within a short time it comes out with

what the new really should be to satisfy the customer, to do the

work customers want and pay for. The creative imitation has then

set the standard and takes over the market.

When semiconductors became available, everyone in the watch

industry knew that they could be used to power a watch much more

accurately, much more reliably, and much more cheaply than

traditional watch movements. The Swiss soon brought out a

quartz-powered digital watch. But they had so much investment in

traditional watchmaking that they decided on a gradual

introduction of quartz-powered digital watches over a long period

of time, during which these new timepieces would remain expensive

luxuries.

Meanwhile, the Hattori Company in Japan had long been making

conventional watches for the Japanese market. It saw the

opportunity and went in for creative imitation, developing the

quartz-powered digital watch as the standard timepiece. By the

time the Swiss had woken up, it was too late. Seiko watches had

become the world’s best sellers, with the Swiss almost pushed out

of the market.

Like “being fustest with the mostest,” creative imitation is a

strategy aimed at market or industry leadership, if not at market

or industry dominance. But it is much less risky. By the time the

creative imitator moves, the market has been established and the

new venture has been accepted. Indeed, there is usually more

demand for it than the original innovator can easily supply. The

market segmentations are known or at least knowable. By then, too,

market research can find out what customers buy, how they buy,

what constitutes value for them, and so on.

Of course, the original innovator may do it right the first

time, thus closing the door to creative imitation. There is the

risk of an innovator bringing out and doing the right job with

vitamins as Hoffmann-LaRoche did, or with nylon as did Du Pont.

But the number of entrepreneurs engaging in creative imitation,

and their substantial success, indicates that perhaps the risk of

the first innovator’s preempting the market by getting it right is

not an overwhelming one.

The creative innovator exploits the success of others. Creative

imitation is not “innovation” in the sense in which the term is

most commonly understood. The creative imitator does not invent a

product or service; he perfects and positions it. In the form in

which it has been introduced, it lacks something. It may be

additional product features. It may be segmentation of product or

services so that slightly different versions fit slightly

different markets. It might be proper positioning of the product

in the market. Or creative imitation supplies something that is

still lacking.

The creative imitator looks at products or services from the

viewpoint of the customer. Creative imitation starts out with

markets rather than with products, and with customers rather than

with producers. It is both market-focused and market-driven. But

creative imitators do not succeed by taking away customers from

the pioneers who have first introduced a new product or service;

they serve markets the pioneers have created but do not adequately

service. Creative imitation satisfies a demand that already exists

rather than creating one.

The strategy has its own risks, and they are considerable.

Creative imitators are easily tempted to splinter their efforts in

the attempt to hedge their bets. Another danger is to misread the

trend and imitate creatively what then turns out not to be the

winning development in the marketplace.

IBM, the world’s foremost creative imitator, exemplifies these

dangers. It has successfully imitated every major development in

the office-automation field. As a result, it has the leading

product in every single area. But because they originated in

imitation, the products are so diverse and so little compatible

with one another that it is all but impossible to build an

integrated, automated office out of IBM building blocks. It is

thus still doubtful that IBM can maintain leadership in the

automated office and provide the integrated system for it. Yet

this is where the main market of the future is going to be in all

probability. And this risk, the risk of being too clever, is

inherent in the creative imitation strategy.

Creative imitation is likely to work most effectively in

high-tech areas for one simple reason: high-tech innovators are

least likely to be market-focused, and most likely to be

technology and product-focused. They therefore tend to

misunderstand their own success and to fail to exploit and supply

the demand they have created.

Entrepreneurial Judo

In 1947, Bell Laboratories invented the transistor. It was at

once realized that the transistor was going to replace the vacuum

tube, especially in consumer electronics such as the radio and the

brand-new television set. Everybody knew this; but nobody did

anything about it. The leading manufacturers—at that time they

were all Americans—began to study the transistor and to make plans

for conversion to the transistor “sometime around 1970.” Till

then, they proclaimed, the transistor “would not be ready.” Sony

was practically unknown outside of Japan and was not even in

consumer electronics at the time. But Akio Morita, Sony’s

president, read about the transistor in the newspapers. As a

result, he went to the United States and bought a license for the

new transistor from Bell Labs for a ridiculous sum, all of

twenty-five thousand dollars. Two years later Sony brought out the

first portable transistor radio, which weighed less than one-fifth

of comparable vacuum tube radios on the market, and cost less than

one-third of what they cost. Three years later Sony had the market

for cheap radios in the United States; and two years after that,

the Japanese had captured the radio market all over the world.

Of course, this is a classic case of the rejection of the

unexpected success. The Americans rejected the transistor because

it was “not invented here,” that is, not invented by one of the

electrical and electronic leaders, RCA and GE. It is a typical

example of pride in doing things the hard way. The Americans were

so proud of the wonderful radios of those days, the great Super

Heterodyne sets that were such marvels of craftsmanship. Compared

with them, they thought transistors low-grade, if not indeed

beneath their dignity.

But Sony’s success is not the real story. How do we explain

that the Japanese repeated this same strategy again and again, and

always with success, always surprising the Americans? The

Japanese, in other words, have been successful again and again in

practicing “entrepreneurial judo” against the Americans.

But so were MCI and Sprint successful when they used the Bell

Telephone System’s (AT&T) own pricing to take away from the Bell

System a very large part of the long-distance business. So was

ROLM when it used Bell System’s policies against it to take away a

large part of the private branch exchange (PBX) market. And so was

Citibank when it started a consumer bank in Germany, the

Familienbank (Family Bank), which within a few short years came to

dominate German consumer finance.

The German banks knew that ordinary consumers had obtained

purchasing power and had become desirable clients. They went

through the motions of offering consumers banking services. But

they really did not want them. Consumers, they felt, were beneath

the dignity of a major bank, with its business customers and its

rich investment clients. If consumers needed an account at all,

they should have it with the postal savings bank.

All these newcomers—the Japanese, MCI, ROLM, Citibank—practiced

“entrepreneurial judo.” Of the entrepreneurial strategies,

especially the strategies aimed at obtaining leadership and

dominance in an industry or a market, entrepreneurial judo is by

all odds the least risky and the most likely to succeed.

Every policeman knows that a habitual criminal will always

commit his crime the same way—whether it is cracking a safe or

entering a building he wants to loot. He leaves behind a

“signature,” which is as individual and as distinct as a

fingerprint. And he will not change that signature even though it

leads to his being caught time and again.

But it is not only the criminal who is set in his habits. All

of us are. And so are businesses and industries. The habit will be

persisted in even though it leads again and again to loss of

leadership and loss of market. The American manufacturers

persisted in the habits that enabled the Japanese to take over

their market again and again.

If the criminal is caught, he rarely accepts that his habit has

betrayed him. On the contrary, he will find all kinds of

excuses—and continue the habitual behavior that led to his being

captured. Similarly, businesses that are being betrayed by their

habits will not admit it and will find all kinds of excuses. The

American electronics manufacturers, for instance, attribute the

Japanese successes to “low labor costs” in Japan. Yet the few

American manufacturers that have faced up to reality, for example,

RCA and Magnavox in television sets, are able to turn out in the

United States products at prices competitive with those of the

Japanese, and competitive also in quality, despite their paying

American wages and union benefits. The German banks uniformly

explain the success of Citibank’s Familienbank by its taking risks

they themselves would not touch. But Familienbank has lower credit

losses with consumer loans than the German banks, and its lending

requirements are as strict as those of the Germans. The German

banks know this, of course. Yet they keep on explaining away their

failure and Familienbank’s success. This is typical. And it

explains why the same strategy—the same entrepreneurial judo—can

be used over and over again.

There are in particular five fairly common bad habits that

enable newcomers to use entrepreneurial judo and to catapult

themselves into a leadership position in an industry against the

entrenched, established companies.

1. The first is what American slang calls NIH (“not invented

here”), the arrogance that leads a company or an industry to

believe that something new cannot be any good unless they

themselves thought of it. And so the new invention is spurned, as

was the transistor by the American electronics manufacturers.

2. The second is the tendency to “cream” a market, that is, to

get the high-profit part of it.

This is basically what Xerox did and what made it an easy

target for the Japanese imitators of its copying machines. Xerox

focused its strategy on the big users, the buyers of large numbers

of machines or of expensive, high-performance machines. It did not

reject the others; but it did not go after them. In particular, it

did not see fit to give them service. In the end it was

dissatisfaction with the service—or rather, with the lack of

service—Xerox provided for its smaller customers that made them

receptive to competitors’ machines.

“Creaming” is a violation of elementary managerial and economic

precepts. It is always punished by loss of market.

3. Even more debilitating is the third bad habit: the belief in

“quality.” “Quality” in a product or service is not what the

supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing

to pay for. A product is not “quality” because it is hard to make

and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. That

is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and

gives them value. Nothing else constitutes “quality.”

4. Closely related to both “creaming” and “quality” is the

fourth bad habit, the illusion of the “premium” price. A “premium”

price is always an invitation to the competitor.

What looks like higher profits for the established leader is in

effect a subsidy to the newcomer who, in a very few years, will

unseat the leader and claim the throne for himself. “Premium”

prices, instead of being an occasion for joy—and a reason for a

higher stock price or a higher price/earnings multiple—should

always be considered a threat and a dangerous vulnerability.

Yet the illusion of higher profits to be achieved through

“premium” prices is almost universal, even though it always opens

the door to entrepreneurial judo.

5. Finally, there is a fifth bad habit that is typical of

established businesses and leads to their downfall. They maximize

rather than optimize. As the market grows and develops, they try

to satisfy every single user through the same product or service.

Xerox is a good example of a company with this habit.

Similarly, when the Japanese came onto the market with their

copiers in competition with Xerox, they designed machines that

fitted specific groups of users—for example, the small office,

whether that of the dentist, the doctor, or the school principal.

They did not try to match the features of which the Xerox people

were the proudest, such as the speed of the machine or the clarity

of the copy. They gave the small office what the small office

needed most, a simple machine at a low cost. And once they had

established themselves in that market, they then moved in on the

other markets, each with a product designed to serve optimally a

specific market segment.

Sony similarly first moved into the low end of the radio

market, the market for cheap portables with limited range. Once it

had established itself there, it moved in on the other market

segments.

Entrepreneurial judo aims first at securing a beachhead, and

one that the established leaders either do not defend at all or

defend only halfheartedly—the way the Germans did not

counterattack when Citibank established its Familienbank. Once

that beachhead has been secured, that is, once the newcomers have

an adequate market and an adequate revenue stream, they then move

on to the rest of the “beach” and finally to the whole “island.”

In each case, they repeat the strategy. They design a product or a

service that is specific to a given market segment and optimal for

it. And the established leaders hardly ever beat them at this

game. Hardly ever do the established leaders manage to change

their own behavior before the newcomers have taken over the

leadership and acquired dominance.

Entrepreneurial judo requires some degree of genuine

innovation. It is, as a rule, not good enough to offer the same

product or the same service at lower cost. There has to be

something that distinguishes it from what already exists.

It is not enough, in other words, for the newcomer simply to do

as good a job as the established leader at a lower cost or with

better service. The newcomers have to make themselves distinct.

Like “being fustest with the mostest” and creative imitation,

entrepreneurial judo aims at obtaining leadership position and

eventually dominance. But it does not do so by competing with the

leaders—or at least not where the leaders are aware of competitive

challenge or worried about it. Entrepreneurial judo “hits them

where they ain’t.”

The Toll-Gate Strategy

The entrepreneurial strategies discussed so far, “being fustest

with the mostest,” “hitting them where they ain’t” or creative

imitation, and entrepreneurial judo, all aim at market or industry

leadership, if not at dominance. The “ecological niche” strategy

aims at control. The strategies discussed earlier aim at

positioning an enterprise in a large market or a major industry.

The ecological niche strategy aims at obtaining a practical

monopoly in a small area. The first three strategies are

competitive strategies. The ecological niche strategy aims at

making its successful practitioners immune to competition and

unlikely to be challenged. Successful practitioners of “being

fustest with the mostest,” creative imitation, and entrepreneurial

judo become big companies, highly visible if not household words.

Successful practitioners of the ecological niche take the cash and

let the credit go. They revel in their anonymity. Indeed, in the

most successful uses of the ecological niche strategy, the whole

point is to be so inconspicuous, despite the product’s being

essential to a process, that no one is likely to try to compete.

There are three distinct versions of the ecological niche

strategy, each with its own requirements, its own limitations, and

its own risks.

Toll-gate strategy

Specialty skill strategy

Specialty market strategy

The Alcon Company developed an enzyme to eliminate the one

feature of the standard surgical operation for senile cataracts

that went counter to the rhythm and the logic of the process. Once

this enzyme had been developed and patented, it had a “toll-gate”

position. No eye surgeon would do without it. No matter what Alcon

charged for the teaspoonful of enzyme that was needed for each

cataract operation, the cost was insignificant in relation to the

total cost of the operation. I doubt that any eye surgeon or any

hospital ever even inquired what the stuff cost. The total market

for this particular preparation was so small—maybe fifty million

dollars a year worldwide—that it clearly would not have been worth

anybody’s while to try to develop a competing product. There would

not have been one additional cataract operation in the world just

because this particular enzyme had become cheaper. All that

potential competitors could possibly do, therefore, would have

been to knock down the price for everybody, without deriving much

benefit for themselves.

The toll-gate position is thus in many ways the most desirable

position a company can occupy. But it has stringent requirements.

The product has to be essential to a process. The risk of not

using it—the risk of losing an eye—must be infinitely greater than

the cost of the product. The market must be so limited that

whoever occupies it first preempts it. It must be a true

“ecological niche” that one species fills completely, and which at

the same time is small and discreet enough not to attract rivals.

Such toll-gate positions are not easily found. Normally they

occur only in an incongruity situation. The incongruity, as in the

case of Alcon’s enzyme, might be an incongruity in the rhythm or

the logic of a process.

The toll-gate position also has severe limitations and serious

risks. It is basically a static position. Once the ecological

niche has been occupied, there is unlikely to be much growth.

There is nothing the company that occupies the toll-gate position

can do to increase its business or to control it. No matter how

good its product or how cheap, the demand is dependent upon the

demand for the process or product to which the toll-gate product

furnishes an ingredient.

Once the toll-gate strategy has attained its objective, the

company is “mature.” It can only grow as fast as its end users

grow. But it can go down fast. It can become obsolete almost

overnight if someone finds a different way of satisfying the same

end use.

And the toll-gate strategist must never exploit his monopoly.

He must not become what the Germans call a Raubritter (the English

“robber baron” does not mean quite the same thing), who robbed and

raped the hapless travelers as they passed through the mountain

defiles and river gorges atop of which perched his castle. He must

not abuse his monopoly to exploit, extort, or maltreat his

customers. If he does, the users will put another supplier into

business, or they will switch to less effective substitutes that

they can then control.

The Specialty Skill Strategy

Everybody knows the major automobile nameplates. But few people

know the names of the companies that supply the electrical and

lighting systems for these cars, and yet there are far fewer such

systems than there are automobile nameplates: in the United

States, the Delco group of GM; in Germany, Robert Bosch; in Great

Britain, Lucas; and so on.

But once these companies had attained their controlling

position in their specialty skill niche, they retained it. Unlike

the toll-gate companies, theirs is a fairly large niche, yet it is

still unique. It was obtained by developing high skill at a very

early time. An enterprising German attained such a hold on one

specialty skill niche that guidebooks for tourists are still

called by his name, “Baedeker.”

As these cases show, timing is of the essence in establishing a

specialty skill niche. It has to be done at the very beginning of

a new industry, a new custom, a new market, a new trend. Karl

Baedeker published his first guidebook in 1828, as soon as the

first steamships on the Rhine opened tourist travel to the middle

classes. He then had the field virtually to himself until World

War I made German books unacceptable in Western countries.

To attain a specialty niche always requires something new,

something added, something that is genuine innovation. There were

guidebooks for travelers before Baedeker, but they confined

themselves to the cultural scene—churches, sights, and so on. For

practical details—the hotels, the fare of the horse-drawn cabs,

the distances, and the proper amount to tip—the traveling English

milord relied on a professional, the courier. But the middle class

had no courier, and that was Baedeker’s opportunity. Once he had

learned what information the traveler needed, how to get at it and

to present it (the format he established is still the one many

guidebooks follow), it would not have paid anyone to duplicate

Baedeker’s investment and build a competing organization.

In the early stages of a major new development, the specialty

skill niche offers an exceptional opportunity. Examples abound.

For many, many years there were only two companies in the United

States making airplane propellers, for instance. Both had been

started before World War I.

A specialty skill niche is rarely found by accident. In every

case, it results from a systematic survey of innovative

opportunities. In every case, the entrepreneur looks for the place

where a specialty skill can be developed and can give a new

enterprise a unique controlling position.

Robert Bosch spent years studying the new automotive field to

position his new company where it could immediately establish

itself as the leader. Hamilton Propeller, for many years the

leading airplane propeller manufacturer in the United States, was

the result of a systematic search by its founder in the early days

of powered flight. Baedeker made several attempts to start a

service for the tourist before he decided on the guidebook that

then bore his name and made him famous.

The first point, therefore, is that in the early stages of a

new industry, a new market, or a new major trend, there is the

opportunity to search systematically for the specialty skill

opportunity—and then there is usually time to develop a unique

skill.

The second point is that the specialty skill niche does require

a skill that is both unique and different. The early automobile

pioneers were, without exception, mechanics. They knew a great

deal about machinery, about metals, and about engines. But

electricity was alien to them. It required theoretical knowledge

that they neither possessed nor knew how to acquire. There were

other publishers in Baedeker’s time, but a guidebook that required

on-the-spot gathering of an enormous amount of detailed

information, constant inspection, and a staff of traveling

auditors was not within their purview.

The business that establishes itself in a specialty skill niche

is therefore unlikely to be threatened by its customers or by its

suppliers. Neither of them really wants to get into something that

is so alien in skill and in temperament.

Third, a business occupying a specialty skill niche must

constantly work on improving its own skill. It has to stay ahead.

Indeed, it has to make itself constantly obsolete. The automobile

companies in the early days used to complain that Delco in Dayton,

and Bosch in Stuttgart, were pushing them. They turned out

lighting systems that were far ahead of the ordinary automobile,

ahead of what the automobile manufacturers of the times thought

the customer needed, wanted, or could pay for, ahead very often of

what the automobile manufacturer knew how to assemble.

While the specialty skill niche has unique advantages, it also

has severe limitations. One is that it inflicts tunnel vision on

its occupants. In order to maintain themselves in their

controlling position, they have to learn to look neither right nor

left, but directly ahead at their narrow area, their specialized

field.

A second, serious limitation is that the occupant of a

specialty skill niche is usually dependent on somebody else to

bring his product or service to market. It becomes a component.

The strength of the automobile electrical firms is that the

customer does not know that they exist. But this is of course also

their weakness.

Finally, the greatest danger to the specialty skill niche

manufacturer is for the specialty to cease being a specialty and

to become universal.

The specialty skill niche, like all ecological niches, is

limited—in scope as well as in time. Species that occupy such a

niche, biology teaches, do not easily adapt to even small changes

in the external environment. And this is true, too, of the

entrepreneurial skill species. But within these limitations, the

specialty skill niche is a highly advantageous position. In a

rapidly expanding new technology, industry, or market, it is

perhaps the most advantageous strategy. Very few of the automobile

makers of 1920 are still around; every one of the electrical and

lighting systems makers is. Once attained and properly maintained,

the specialty skill niche protects against competition, precisely

because no automobile buyer knows or cares who makes the

headlights or the brakes. No automobile buyer is therefore likely

to shop around for either. Once the name “Baedeker” had become

synonymous with tourist guidebooks, there was little danger that

anybody else would try to muscle in, at least not until the market

changed drastically. In a new technology, a new industry, or a new

market, the specialty skill strategy offers an optimal ratio of

opportunity to risk of failure.

The Specialty Market Strategy

The major difference between the specialty skill niche and the

specialty market niche is that the former is built around a

product or service and the latter around specialized knowledge of

a market. Otherwise, they are similar.

Two medium-sized companies, one in northern England and one in

Denmark, supply the great majority of the automated baking ovens

for cookies and crackers bought in the non-Communist world. For

many decades, two companies—the two earliest travel agents, Thomas

Cook in Europe and American Express in the United States—had a

practical monopoly on traveler’s checks.

There is, I am told, nothing very difficult or particularly

technical about baking ovens. There are literally dozens of

companies around that could make them just as well as those two

firms in England and Denmark. But these two know the market: they

know every major baker, and every major baker knows them. The

market is just not big enough or attractive enough to try to

compete with these two, as long as they remain satisfactory.

Similarly, traveler’s checks were a backwater business until the

post–World War II period of mass travel. They were highly

profitable since the issuer, whether Cook or American Express, had

the use of the money and kept the interest earned on it until the

purchaser cashed the check—sometimes months after the checks were

purchased. But the market was not large enough to tempt anyone

else. Furthermore, traveler’s checks required a worldwide

organization, which Cook and American Express had to maintain

anyhow to service their travel customers, and which nobody else in

those days had any reason to build.

The specialty market is found by looking at a new development

with the question, What opportunities are there in this that would

give us a unique niche, and what do we have to do to fill it ahead

of everybody else? The traveler’s check was no great “invention.”

It was basically nothing more than a letter of credit, and that

had been around for hundreds of years. What was new was that

traveler’s checks were offered—at first to the customers of Cook

and American Express, and then to the general public—in standard

denominations. And they could be cashed wherever Cook or American

Express had an office or an agent. That made them uniquely

attractive to the tourist who did not want to carry a great deal

of cash and did not have the established banking connections to

make them eligible for a letter of credit.

There was nothing particularly advanced in the early baking

ovens, nor is there any high technology in the baking ovens

installed today. What the two leading firms did was to realize

that the act of baking cookies and crackers was moving out of the

home and into the factory. They then studied what commercial

bakers needed so that they could manufacture the product their own

customers, grocers and supermarkets, could in turn sell and the

housewife would buy. The baking ovens were not based on

engineering but on market research; the engineering would have

been available to anyone.

The specialty market niche has the same requirements as the

specialty skill niche: systematic analysis of a new trend,

industry, or market; a specific innovative contribution, if only a

“twist” like the one that converted the traditional letter of

credit into the modern traveler’s check; and continual work to

improve the product and especially the service, so that

leadership, once obtained, will be retained.

And it has the same limitations. The greatest threat to the

specialty market position is success. The greatest threat is when

the specialty market becomes a mass market.

Traveler’s checks have now become a commodity and highly

competitive because travel has become a mass market.

So have perfumes. A French firm, Coty, created the modern

perfume industry. It realized that World War I had changed the

attitude toward cosmetics. Whereas before the war only “fast

women” used cosmetics—or dared admit to their use—cosmetics had

become accepted and respectable. By the mid-1920s, Coty had

established itself in what was almost a monopoly position on both

sides of the Atlantic. Until 1929 the cosmetics market was a

“specialty market,” a market of the upper middle class. But then

during the Great Depression it exploded into a genuine mass

market. It also split into two segments: a prestige segment, with

high prices, specialty packaging, and specialty distribution; and

popular-priced, mass brands sold in every outlet including the

supermarket, the variety store, and the drugstore. Within a few

short years, the specialty market dominated by Coty had

disappeared. But Coty could not make up its mind whether to try to

become one of the mass marketers in cosmetics or one of the luxury

producers. It tried to stay in a market that no longer existed,

and has been drifting ever since.

Creating Customer Utility

In the entrepreneurial strategies discussed so far in this

chapter, the aim is to introduce an innovation. In the

entrepreneurial strategy discussed in this section, the strategy

itself is the innovation. The product or service it carries may

well have been around a long time. But the strategy converts this

old, established product or service into something new. It changes

its utility, its value, its economic characteristics. While

physically there is no change, economically there is something

different and new.

All the strategies discussed in this section have one thing in

common. They create a customer—and that is the ultimate purpose of

a business, indeed, of economic activity. But they do so in four

different ways:

Creating utility

Pricing

Adaptation to the customer’s social and economic reality

Delivering what represents true value to the customer

Price is usually almost irrelevant in the strategy of creating

utility. The strategy works by enabling customers to do what

serves their purpose. It works because it asks, What is truly a

“service,” truly a “utility” to the customer?

Every American bride wants to get one set of “good china.” A

whole set is, however, far too expensive a present, and the people

giving her a wedding present do not know what pattern the bride

wants or what pieces she already has. So they end up giving

something else. The demand was there, in other words, but the

utility was lacking. A medium-sized dinnerware manufacturer, the

Lenox China Company, saw this as an innovative opportunity. Lenox

adapted an old idea, the “bridal register,” so that it only

“registers” Lenox china. The bride-to-be then picks one merchant

whom she tells what pattern of Lenox china she wants, and to whom

she refers potential donors of wedding gifts. The merchant then

asks the donor, “How much do you want to spend?” and explains,

“That will get you two coffee cups with saucers.” Or the merchant

can say, “She already has all the coffee cups; what she needs now

is dessert plates.” The result is a happy bride, a happy

wedding-gift donor, and a very happy Lenox China Company.

Again, there is no high technology here, nothing patentable,

nothing but a focus on the needs of the customer. Yet the bridal

register, for all its simplicity—or perhaps because of it—has made

Lenox the favorite “good china” manufacturer and one of the most

rapidly growing of medium-sized American manufacturing companies.

Pricing

For many years the best-known American face in the world was

that of King Gillette, which graced the wrapper of every Gillette

razor blade sold anyplace in the world. And millions of men all

over the world used a Gillette razor blade every morning.

King Gillette did not invent the safety razor; dozens of them

were patented in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

Gillette’s safety razor was no better than many others, and it

was a good deal more expensive to produce. But Gillette did not

“sell” the razor. He practically gave it away by pricing it at

fifty-five cents retail or twenty cents wholesale, not much more

than one-fifth of its manufacturing cost. But he designed it so

that it could use only his patented blades. These cost him less

than one cent apiece to make: he sold them for five cents. And

since the blades could be used six or seven times, they delivered

a shave at less than one cent apiece—or at less than one-tenth the

cost of a visit to a barber.

What Gillette did was to price what the customer buys, namely,

the shave, rather than what the manufacturer sells. In the end,

the captive Gillette customer may have paid more than he would

have paid had he bought a competitor’s safety razor for five

dollars, and then bought the competitor’s blades selling at one

cent or two. Gillette’s customers surely knew this; customers are

more intelligent than either advertising agencies or Ralph Nader

believe. But Gillette’s pricing made sense to them. They were

paying for what they bought, that is, for a shave, rather than for

a “thing.” And the shave they got from the Gillette razor and the

Gillette razor blade was much more pleasant than any shave they

could have given themselves with that dangerous weapon, the

straight-edge razor, and far cheaper than they could have gotten

at the neighborhood barber’s.

One reason why the patents on a copying machine ended up at a

small, obscure company in Rochester, New York, then known as the

Haloid Company, rather than at one of the big printing-machine

manufacturers, was that none of the large established

manufacturers saw any possibility of selling a copying machine.

Their calculations showed that such a machine would have to sell

for at least $4,000. Nobody was going to pay such a sum for a

copying machine when carbon paper cost practically nothing. Also,

of course, to spend $4,000 on a machine meant a

capital-appropriations request, which had to go all the way up to

the board of directors accompanied by a calculation showing the

return on investment, both of which seemed unimaginable for a

gadget to help the secretary. The Haloid Company—the present

Xerox—did a good deal of technical work to design the final

machine. But its major contribution was in pricing. It did not

sell the machine; it sold what the machine produced, copies. At

five or ten cents a copy, there is no need for a

capital-appropriations request. This is “petty cash,” which the

secretary can disburse without going upstairs. Pricing the Xerox

machine at five cents a copy was the true innovation.

Most suppliers, including public-service institutions, never

think of pricing as a strategy. Yet pricing enables the customer

to pay for what he buys—a shave, a copy of a document—rather than

for what the supplier makes. What is being paid in the end is, of

course, the same amount. But how it is being paid is structured to

the needs and the realities of the consumer. It is structured in

accordance with what the consumer actually buys. And it charges

for what represents “value” to the customer rather than what

represents “cost” to the supplier.

The Customer’s Reality

The worldwide leadership of the American General Electric

Company (GE) in large steam turbines is based on GE’s having

thought through, in the years before World War I, what its

customers’ realities were. Steam turbines, unlike the

piston-driven steam engines, which they replaced in the generation

of electric power, are complex, requiring a high degree of

engineering in their design, and skill in building and fitting

them. This the individual electric power company simply cannot

supply. It buys a major steam turbine maybe every five or ten

years when it builds a new power station. Yet the skill has to be

kept in readiness all the time. The manufacturer, therefore, has

to set up and maintain a massive consulting organization.

But, as GE soon found out, the customer cannot pay for

consulting services. Under American law, the state public utility

commissions would have to allow such an expenditure. In the

opinion of the commissions, however, the companies should have

been able to do this work themselves. GE also found that it could

not add to the price of the steam turbine the cost of the

consulting services that its customers needed. Again, the public

utility commissions would not have accepted it. But while a steam

turbine has a very long life, it needs a new set of blades fairly

often, maybe every five to seven years, and these blades have to

come from the maker of the original turbine. GE built up the

world’s foremost consulting engineering organization on electric

power stations—though it was careful not to call this consulting

engineering but “apparatus sales”—for which it did not charge. Its

steam turbines were no more expensive than those of its

competitors. But it put the added cost of the consulting

organization plus a substantial profit into the price it charged

for replacement blades. Within ten years all the other

manufacturers of steam turbines had caught on and switched to the

same system. But by then GE had world market leadership.

Much earlier, during the 1840s, a similar design of product and

process to fit customer realities led to the invention of

installment buying. Cyrus McCormick was one of many Americans who

built a harvesting machine—the need was obvious. And he found, as

had the other inventors of similar machines, that he could not

sell his product. The farmer did not have the purchasing power.

That the machine would earn back what it cost within two or three

seasons, everybody knew and accepted, but there was no banker then

who would have lent the American farmer the money to buy a

machine. McCormick offered installments, to be paid out of the

savings the harvester produced over the ensuing three years. The

farmer could now afford to buy the machine—and he did so.

Manufacturers are wont to talk of the “irrational customer” (as

do economists, psychologists, and moralists). But there are no

“irrational customers.” As an old saying has it, There are only

lazy manufacturers. The customer has to be assumed to be rational.

His or her reality, however, is usually quite different from that

of the manufacturer.

Delivering Value to the Customer

The last of these innovative strategies delivers what is

“value” to the customer rather than what is “product” to the

manufacturer. It is actually only one step beyond the strategy of

accepting the customer’s reality as part of the product and part

of what the customer buys and pays for.

A medium-sized company in America’s Midwest supplies more than

half of all the special lubricant needed for very large

earth-moving and hauling machines: the bulldozers and draglines

used by contractors building highways; the heavy equipment used to

remove the overlay from strip mines; the heavy trucks used to haul

coal out of coal mines; and so on. This company is in competition

with some of the largest oil companies, which can mobilize whole

battalions of lubrication specialists. It competes by not selling

lubricating oil at all. Instead, it sells what is, in effect,

insurance. What is “value” to the contractor is not lubrication:

it is operating the equipment. Every hour the contractor loses

because this or that piece of heavy equipment cannot operate costs

him infinitely more than he spends on lubricants during an entire

year. In all its activities there is a heavy penalty for

contractors who miss their deadlines—and they can only get the

contract by calculating the deadline as finely as possible and

racing against the clock. What the midwestern lubricant maker does

is to offer contractors an analysis of the maintenance needs of

their equipment. Then it offers them a maintenance program with an

annual subscription price, and guarantees the subscribers that

their heavy equipment will not be shut down for more than a given

number of hours per year because of lubrication problems. Needless

to say, the program always prescribes the manufacturer’s

lubricant. But that is not what contractors buy. They are buying

trouble-free operations, which are extremely valuable to them.

These examples are likely to be considered obvious. Surely,

anybody applying a little intelligence would have come up with

these and similar strategies? But the father of systematic

economics, David Ricardo, is believed to have said once, “Profits

are not made by differential cleverness, but by differential

stupidity.” The strategies work, not because they are clever, but

because most suppliers—of goods as well as of services, businesses

as well as public-service institutions—do not think. They work

precisely because they are so “obvious.” Why, then, are they so

rare? For, as these examples show, anyone who asks the question,

What does the customer really buy? will win the race. In fact, it

is not even a race since nobody else is running. What explains

this?

One reason is the economists and their concept of “value.”

Every economics book points out that customers do not buy a

“product,” but what the product does for them. And then, every

economics book promptly drops consideration of everything except

the “price” for the product, a “price” defined as what the

customer pays to take possession or ownership of a thing or a

service. What the product does for the customer is never mentioned

again. Unfortunately, suppliers, whether of products or of

services, tend to follow the economists.

It is meaningful to say that “product A costs X dollars.” It is

meaningful to say that “we have to get Y dollars for the product

to cover our own costs of production and have enough left over to

cover the cost of capital, and thereby to show an adequate

profit.” But it makes no sense at all to conclude, “. . . and

therefore the customer has to pay the lump sum of Y dollars in

cash for each piece of product A he buys.” Rather, the argument

should go as follows: “What the customer pays for each piece of

the product has to work out as Y dollars for us. But how the

customer pays depends on what makes the most sense to him. It

depends on what the product does for the customer. It depends on

what fits his reality. It depends on what the customer sees as

‘value.’ ”

Price in itself is not “pricing,” and it is not “value.”

But this is nothing but elementary marketing, most readers will

protest, and they are right. It is nothing but elementary

marketing. To start out with the customer’s utility, with what the

customer buys, with what the realities of the customer are and

what the customer’s values are—this is what marketing is all

about. But why, after forty years of preaching marketing, teaching

marketing, professing marketing, so few suppliers are willing to

follow, I cannot explain. The fact remains that so far, anyone who

is willing to use marketing as the basis for strategy is likely to

acquire leadership in an industry or a market fast and almost

without risk.

II.

THE INDIVIDUAL

13.

EFFECTIVENESS MUST

BE LEARNED

To be effective is the job of the knowledge worker. Whether he

or she works in a business or in a hospital, in a government

agency or in a labor union, in a university or in the army, the

knowledge worker is, first of all, expected to get the right

things done. And this means simply that the knowledge worker is

expected to be effective.

Yet people of high effectiveness are conspicuous by their

absence in knowledge jobs. High intelligence is common enough

among knowledge workers. Imagination is far from rare. The level

of knowledge tends to be high. But there seems to be little

correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence,

his imagination, or his knowledge. Brilliant men are often

strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant

insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that

insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

Conversely, in every organization there are some highly effective

plodders. While others rush around in the frenzy and busyness that

very bright people so often confuse with “creativity,” the plodder

puts one foot in front of the other and gets there first, like the

tortoise in the old fable.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential

resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By

themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.

Why We Need Effectiveness

All this should be obvious. But why then has so little

attention been paid to effectiveness, in an age in which there are

mountains of books and articles on every other aspect of the

executive’s tasks?

One reason for this neglect is that effectiveness is the

specific technology of the knowledge worker within an

organization. Until recently, there was no more than a handful of

these around.

For manual work, we need only efficiency, that is, the ability

to do things right rather than the ability to get the right things

done. The manual worker can always be judged in terms of the

quantity and quality of a definable and discrete output, such as a

pair of shoes. We have learned how to measure efficiency and how

to define quality in manual work during the last hundred years—to

the point where we have been able to multiply the output of the

individual worker tremendously.

Formerly, the manual worker—whether machine operator or

front-line soldier—predominated in all organizations. Few people

of effectiveness were needed: mainly those at the top who gave the

orders that others carried out. They were so small a fraction of

the total work population that we could, rightly or wrongly, take

their effectiveness for granted. We could depend on the supply of

“naturals,” the few people in any area of human endeavor who

somehow know what the rest of us have to learn the hard way.

In fact, only a small fraction of the knowledge workers of

earlier days were part of an organization. Most of them worked by

themselves as professionals, at most with an assistant. Their

effectiveness or lack of effectiveness concerned only themselves

and affected only themselves.

Today, however, the large knowledge organization is the central

reality. Modern society is a society of large organized

institutions. In every one of them, including the armed services,

the center of gravity has shifted to the knowledge worker, the man

who puts to work what he has between his ears rather than the

brawn of his muscles or the skill of his hands. Increasingly, the

majority of people who have been schooled to use knowledge,

theory, and concept rather than physical force or manual skill

work in an organization and are effective insofar as they can make

a contribution to the organization.

Now effectiveness can no longer be taken for granted. Now it

can no longer be neglected.

The imposing system of measurements and tests that we have

developed for manual work—from industrial engineering to quality

control—is not applicable to knowledge work. There are few things

less pleasing to the Lord, and less productive, than an

engineering department that rapidly turns out beautiful blueprints

for the wrong product. Working on the right things is what makes

knowledge work effective. This is not capable of being measured by

any of the yardsticks for manual work.

Knowledge workers cannot be supervised closely or in detail.

They can only be helped. But they must direct themselves, and they

must do so toward performance and contribution, that is, toward

effectiveness.

A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine showed an office on the

door of which was the legend: Chas. Smith, General Sales Manager,

Ajax Soap Company. The walls were bare except for a big sign

saying, think. The man in the office had his feet propped up on

his desk and was blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. Outside two

older men went by, one saying to the other: “But how can we be

sure that Smith thinks soap?”

One can indeed never be sure what the knowledge worker

thinks—and yet thinking is his or her specific work; it is the

knowledge worker’s “doing.”

The motivation of the knowledge worker depends on his being

effective, on being able to achieve. If effectiveness is lacking

in his work, his commitment to work and to contribution will soon

wither, and he will become a time-server going through the motions

from nine to five.

The knowledge worker does not produce something that is

effective by itself. He does not produce a physical product—a

ditch, a pair of shoes, a machine part. He produces knowledge,

ideas, information. By themselves these “products” are useless.

Somebody else, another person of knowledge, has to take them as

his input and convert them into his output before they have any

reality. The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is

meaningless data. The knowledge worker, therefore, must do

something that a manual worker need not do. He must provide

effectiveness. He cannot depend on the utility his output carries

with it as does a well-made pair of shoes.

The knowledge worker is the one “factor of production” through

which the highly developed societies and economies of today—the

United States, Western Europe, Japan, and also increasingly, the

Soviet Union—become and remain competitive.

Who Is an Executive?

Every knowledge worker in a modern organization is an

“executive” if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he or she

is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the

capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results.

This may be the capacity of a business to bring out a new product

or to obtain a larger share of a given market. It may be the

capacity of a hospital to provide bedside care to its patients,

and so on. Such a man or woman must make decisions; he cannot just

carry out orders. He must take responsibility for his

contribution. And he is supposed, by virtue of his knowledge, to

be better equipped to make the right decision than anyone else. He

may be overridden; he may be demoted or fired. But so long as he

has the job, the goals, the standards, and the contribution are in

his keeping.

This fact is perhaps best illustrated by a recent newspaper

interview with a young American infantry captain in the Vietnam

jungle.

Asked by the reporter, “How in this confused situation can you

retain command?” the young captain said, “Around here, I am only

the guy who is responsible. If these men don’t know what to do

when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I’m too far away to

tell them. My job is to make sure they know. What they do depends

on the situation which only they can judge. The responsibility is

always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.”

In a guerrilla war, every person is an “executive.”

Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge

work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its

results. And for these, the size of the group and the magnitude of

the managerial job are not even symptoms.

Having many people working in market research may endow the

results with that increment of insight, imagination, and quality

that gives a company the potential of rapid growth and success. If

so, two hundred people are cheap. But it is just as likely that

the manager will be overwhelmed by all the problems two hundred

people bring to their work and cause through their interactions.

He may be so busy “managing” as to have no time for market

research and for fundamental decisions. He may be so busy checking

figures that he never asks the question, What do we really mean

when we say “our market”? And as a result, he may fail to notice

significant changes in the market that eventually may cause the

downfall of his company.

But the individual market researcher without a staff may be

equally productive or unproductive. He may be the source of the

knowledge and vision that make his company prosper. Or he may

spend so much of his time hunting down details—the footnotes

academicians so often mistake for research—as to see and hear

nothing and to think even less.

Throughout every one of our knowledge organizations, we have

people who manage no one and yet are executives. Rarely indeed do

we find a situation such as that in the Vietnam jungle, where at

any moment, any member of the entire group may be called upon to

make decisions with life-and-death impact for the whole. But the

chemist in the research laboratory who decides to follow one line

of inquiry rather than another one may make the entrepreneurial

decision that determines the future of his company. He may be the

research director. But he also may be—and often is—a chemist with

no managerial responsibilities, if not even a fairly junior

employee. Similarly, the decision what to consider one “product”

in the account books may be made by a senior vice president in the

company. It may also be made by a junior. And this holds true in

all areas of today’s large organization.

I have called “executives” those knowledge workers, managers,

or individual professionals who are expected by virtue of their

position or their knowledge to make decisions in the normal course

of their work that have impact on the performance and results of

the whole. What few yet realize, however, is how many people there

are even in the most humdrum organization of today, whether

business or government agency, research lab or hospital, who have

to make decisions. For the authority of knowledge is surely as

legitimate as the authority of position. These decisions,

moreover, are of the same kind as the decisions of top management.

The most subordinate, we now know, may do the same kind of work

as the president of the company or the administrator of the

government agency, that is, plan, organize, integrate, motivate,

and measure. His compass may be quite limited, but within his

sphere, he is an executive.

Similarly, every decision-maker does the same kind of work as

the company president or the administrator. His scope may be quite

limited. But he is an executive even if his function or his name

appears neither on the organization chart nor in the internal

telephone directory.

And whether chief executive or beginner, he needs to be

effective.

Executive Realities

The realities of the knowledge workers’ situation both demand

effectiveness from them and make effectiveness exceedingly

difficult to achieve. Indeed, unless they work at becoming

effective, the realities of their situation will push them into

futility.

In their situation there are four major realities over which

they essentially no control. Every one of them is built into the

organization and into the executives’ day and work. They have no

choice but to “cooperate with the inevitable.” But every one of

these realities exerts pressure toward nonresults and

nonperformance.

1. The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else. If

one attempted to define an “executive” operationally (that is,

through his activities), one would have to define him as a captive

of the organization. Everybody can move in on his time, and

everybody does. There seems to be very little any one executive

can do about it. He cannot, as a rule, like the physician, stick

his head out the door and say to the nurse, “I won’t see anybody

for the next half hour.” Just at this moment, the executive’s

telephone rings, and he has to speak to the company’s best

customer or to a high official in the city administration or to

his boss—and the next half hour is already gone.

2. Executives are forced to keep on “operating” unless they

take positive action to change the reality in which they live and

work.

But events rarely tell the executive anything, let alone the

real problem. For the doctor, the patient’s complaint is central

because it is central to the patient. The executive is concerned

with a much more complex universe. What events are important and

relevant and what events are merely distractions the events

themselves do not indicate. They are not even symptoms in the

sense in which the patient’s narrative is a clue for the

physician.

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he

does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will

fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent person.

But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw

away what little effectiveness he might have achieved. What the

executive needs are criteria that enable him to work on the truly

important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the

criteria are not found in the flow of events.

3. The third reality pushing the executive toward

ineffectiveness is that he is within an organization. This means

that he is effective only if and when other people make use of

what he contributes. Organization is a means of multiplying the

strength of an individual. It takes his knowledge and uses it as

the resource, the motivation, and the vision of other knowledge

workers. Knowledge workers are rarely in synch with each other,

precisely because they are knowledge workers. Each has his or her

own skill and concerns. One may be interested in tax accounting or

in bacteriology, or in training and developing tomorrow’s key

administrators in the city government. But the worker next door is

interested in the finer points of cost accounting, in hospital

economics, or in the legalities of the city charter. Each has to

be able to use what the other produces.

Usually the people who are most important to the effectiveness

of an executive are not people over whom he has direct control.

They are people in other areas, people who in terms of

organization, are “sideways.” Or they are his superiors. Unless

the executive can reach those people, can make his contribution

effective for them and in their work, he has no effectiveness at

all.

4. Finally, the executive is within an organization.

Every executive, whether his organization is a business or a

research laboratory, a government agency, a large university, or

the air force, sees the inside—the organization—as close and

immediate reality. He sees the outside only through thick and

distorting lenses, if at all. What goes on outside is usually not

even known firsthand. It is received through an organizational

filter of reports, that is, in an already predigested and highly

abstract form that imposes organizational criteria of relevance on

the outside reality.

Specifically, there are no results within the organization. All

the results are on the outside. The only business results, for

instance, are produced by a customer who converts the costs and

efforts of the business into revenues and profits through his

willingness to exchange his purchasing power for the products or

services of the business.

What happens inside any organization is effort and cost. To

speak of “profit centers” in a business as we are wont to do is

polite euphemism. There are only effort centers. The less an

organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its

job. That it takes one hundred thousand employees to produce the

automobiles or the steel the market wants is essentially a gross

engineering imperfection. The fewer people, the smaller, the less

activity inside, the more nearly perfect is the organization in

terms of its only reason for existence: the service to the

environment.

An organization is not, like an animal, an end in itself, and

successful by the mere act of perpetuating the species. An

organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the

contribution it makes to the outside environment. And yet the

bigger and apparently more successful an organization gets to be,

the more will inside events tend to engage the interests, the

energies, and the abilities of the executive to the exclusion of

his real tasks and his real effectiveness in the outside.

This danger is being aggravated today by the advent of the

computer and of the new information technology. The computer,

being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data. These

it can handle with speed, accuracy, and precision. It will,

therefore, grind out hitherto unobtainable quantified information

in large volume. One can, however, by and large quantify only what

goes on inside an organization—costs and production figures,

patient statistics in the hospital, or training reports. The

relevant outside events are rarely available in quantifiable form

until it is much too late to do anything about them.

This is not because our information-gathering capacity in

respect to the outside events lags behind the technical abilities

of the computer. If that was the only thing to worry about, we

would just have to increase statistical efforts—and the computer

itself could greatly help us to overcome this mechanical

limitation. The problem is rather that the important and relevant

outside events are often qualitative and not capable of

quantification. They are not yet “facts.” For a fact, after all,

is an event that somebody has defined, has classified, and, above

all, has endowed with relevance. To be able to quantify, one has

to have a concept first. One first has to abstract from the

infinite welter of phenomena a specific aspect that one then can

name and finally count.

The truly important events on the outside are not the trends.

They are changes in the trends. These determine ultimately success

or failure of an organization and its efforts. Such changes,

however, have to be perceived; they cannot be counted, defined, or

classified. The classifications still produce the expected

figures—as they did for the Edsel. But the figures no longer

correspond to actual behavior.

The computer is a logic machine, and that is its strength—but

also its limitation. The important events on the outside cannot be

reported in the kind of form a computer (or any other logic

system) could possibly handle. Man, however, while not

particularly logical is perceptive—and that is his strength.

The danger is that executives will become contemptuous of

information and stimuli that cannot be reduced to computer logic

and computer language. Executives may become blind to everything

that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the

event). The tremendous amount of computer information may thus

shut out access to reality.

Eventually the computer—potentially by far the most useful

management tool—should make executives aware of their insulation

and free them for more time on the outside. In the short run,

however, there is danger of acute “computeritis.” It is a serious

affliction.

The computer only makes visible a condition that existed before

it. Executives of necessity live and work within an organization.

Unless they make conscious efforts to perceive the outside, the

inside may blind them to the true reality.

These four realities the executive cannot change. They are

necessary conditions of his existence. But he must therefore

assume that he will be ineffectual unless he makes special efforts

to learn to be effective.

The Promise of Effectiveness

Increasing effectiveness may well be the only area where we can

hope significantly to raise the level of the knowledge worker’s

performance, achievement, and satisfaction.

We certainly could use people of much greater abilities in many

places. We could use people of broader knowledge. I submit,

however, that in these two areas, not too much can be expected

from further efforts. We may be getting to the point where we are

already attempting to do the inherently impossible or at least the

inherently unprofitable. But we are not going to breed a new race

of supermen. We will have to run our organizations with men and

women as they are.

The books on manager development, for instance, envisage truly

a “man for all seasons” in their picture of “the manager of

tomorrow.” A senior executive, we are told, should have

extraordinary abilities as an analyst and as a decision-maker. He

or she should be good at working with people and at understanding

organization and power relations, be good at mathematics, and have

artistic insights and creative imagination. What seems to be

wanted is universal genius, and universal genius has always been

in scarce supply. The experience of the human race indicates

strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal

incompetent. We will therefore have to staff our organizations

with people who at best excel in one of these abilities. And then

they are more than likely to lack any but the most modest

endowment in the others.

We will have to learn to build organizations in such a manner

that anybody who has strength in one important area is capable of

putting it to work. But we cannot expect to get the performance we

need by raising our standards for abilities, let alone by hoping

for the universally gifted person. We will have to extend the

range of human beings through the tools they have to work with

rather than through a sudden quantum jump in human ability.

The same, more or less, applies to knowledge. However badly we

may need people of more and better knowledge, the effort needed to

make the major improvement may well be greater than any possible,

let alone any probable, return.

When “operations research” first came in, several of the

brilliant young practitioners published their prescription for the

operations researcher of tomorrow. They always came out asking for

a polymath knowing everything and capable of doing superior and

original work in every area of human knowledge. According to one

of these studies, operations researchers need to have advanced

knowledge in sixty-two or so major scientific and humanistic

disciplines. If such a person could be found, he would, I am

afraid, be totally wasted on studies of inventory levels or on the

programming of production schedules.

Much less ambitious programs for manager development call for

high knowledge in such a host of divergent skills as accounting

and personnel, marketing, pricing and economic analysis, the

behavioral sciences such as psychology, and the natural sciences

from physics to biology and geology. And we surely need people who

understand the dynamics of modern technology, the complexity of

the modern world economy, and the labyrinth of modern government.

Every one of these is a big area, is indeed too big even for

those who work on nothing else. The scholars tend to specialize in

fairly small segments of each of these fields and do not pretend

to have more than a journeyman’s knowledge of the field itself.

I am not saying that one need not try to understand the

fundamentals of every one of these areas.

One of the weaknesses of young, highly educated people

today—whether in business, medicine, or government—is that they

are satisfied to be versed in one narrow specialty and affect a

contempt for the other areas. One need not know in detail what to

do with “human relations” as an accountant, or how to promote a

new branded product if an engineer. But one has a responsibility

to know at least what these areas are about, why they are around,

and what they are trying to do. One need not know psychiatry to be

a good urologist. But one had better know what psychiatry is all

about. One need not be an international lawyer to do a good job in

the Department of Agriculture. But one had better know enough

about international politics not to do international damage

through a parochial farm policy.

This, however, is something very different from the universal

expert, who is as unlikely to occur as is the universal genius.

Instead we will have to learn how to make better use of people who

are good in any one of these areas. But this means increasing

effectiveness. If one cannot increase the supply of a resource,

one must increase its yield. And effectiveness is the one tool to

make the resources of ability and knowledge yield more and better

results.

Effectiveness thus deserves high priority because of the needs

of organization. It deserves even greater priority as the tool of

the executive and as his access to achievement and performance.

Can Effectiveness Be Learned?

If effectiveness were a gift people were born with, the way

they are born with a gift for music or an eye for painting, we

would be in bad shape. For we know that only a small minority is

born with great gifts in any one of these areas. We would

therefore be reduced to trying to spot people with high potential

of effectiveness early and to train them as best we know to

develop their talent. But we could hardly hope to find enough

people for the executive tasks of modern society this way. Indeed,

if effectiveness were a gift, our present civilization would be

highly vulnerable, if not untenable. As a civilization of large

organizations it is dependent on a large supply of people capable

of being executives with a modicum of effectiveness.

If effectiveness can be learned, however, the questions arise:

What does it consist in? What does one have to learn? Of what kind

is the learning? Is it a knowledge—and knowledge one learns in

systematic form and through concepts? Is it a skill that one

learns as an apprentice? Or is it a practice that one learns

through doing the same elementary things over and over again?

I have been asking those questions for a good many years. As a

consultant, I work with executives in many organizations.

Effectiveness is crucial to me in two ways. First, a consultant

who by definition has no authority other than that of knowledge

must himself be effective—or else he is nothing. Second, the most

effective consultant depends on people within the client

organization to get anything done. Their effectiveness therefore

determines in the last analysis whether a consultant contributes

and achieves results, or whether he is pure “cost center” or at

best a court jester.

I soon learned that there is no “effective personality.” The

effective people I have seen differ widely in their temperaments

and their abilities, in what they do and how they do it, in their

personalities, their knowledge, their interests—in fact in almost

everything that distinguishes human beings. All they have in

common is the ability to get the right things done.

Among the effective people I have known and worked with, there

are extroverts and aloof, retiring men, some even morbidly shy.

Some are eccentrics, others painfully correct conformists. Some

are fat and some are lean. Some are worriers; some are relaxed.

Some drink quite heavily; others are total abstainers. Some are

men of great charm and warmth; some have no more personality than

a frozen mackerel. There are a few men among them who would answer

to the popular conception of a “leader.” But equally there are

colorless men who would attract no attention in a crowd. Some are

scholars and serious students, others almost unlettered. Some have

broad interests; others know nothing except their own narrow area

and care for little else. Some of the men are self-centered, if

not indeed selfish. But there are also some who are generous of

heart and mind. There are men who live only for their work and

others whose main interests lie outside—in community work, in

their church, in the study of Chinese poetry, or in modern music.

Among the effective people I have met, there are people who use

logic and analysis and others who rely mainly on perception and

intuition. There are men who make decisions easily and men who

suffer agonies every time they have to move.

Effective people, in other words, differ as widely as

physicians, high-school teachers, or violinists. They differ as

widely as do ineffectual ones, are indeed indistinguishable from

ineffectual people in type, personality, and talents.

What all these effective people have in common is the practices

that make effective whatever they have and whatever they are. And

these practices are the same, whether he or she works in a

business or in a government agency, as hospital administrator, or

as university dean.

But whenever I have found one, no matter how great the

intelligence, the industry, the imagination, or the knowledge, who

fails to observe these practices, I have also found one deficient

in effectiveness.

Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex

of practices. And practices can always be learned. Practices are

simple, deceptively so; even a seven-year-old has no difficulty in

understanding a practice. But practices are always exceedingly

hard to do well. They have to be acquired, as we all learn the

multiplication table; that is, repeated ad nauseam until “6 ¥ 6 =

36” has become unthinking, conditioned reflex, and firmly

ingrained habit. Practices one learns by practicing and practicing

and practicing again.

To every practice applies what my old piano teacher said to me

in exasperation when I was a small boy. “You will never play

Mozart the way Arthur Schnabel does, but there is no reason in the

world why you should not play your scales the way he does.” What

the piano teacher forgot to add—probably because it was so obvious

to her—is that even the great pianists could not play Mozart as

they do unless they practiced their scales and kept on practicing

them.

There is, in other words, no reason why anyone with normal

endowment should not acquire competence in any practice. Mastery

might well elude him; for that one might need special talents. But

what is needed in effectiveness is competence. What is needed are

“the scales.”

14.

FOCUS ON CONTRIBUTION

The effective person focuses on contribution. He looks up from

his work and outward toward goals. He asks, “What can I contribute

that will significantly affect the performance and the results of

the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility.

The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness: in one’s

own work (its content, its level, its standards, and its impacts)

in one’s relations with others (with superiors, associates,

subordinates), and in the use of the tools of the executive such

as meetings or reports.

The great majority of people tend to focus downward. They are

occupied with efforts rather than with results. They worry over

what the organization and their superiors “owe” them and should do

for them. And they are conscious above all of the authority they

“should have.” As a result, they render themselves ineffectual.

The head of one of the large management consulting firms always

starts an assignment with a new client by spending a few days

visiting the senior executives of the client organization one by

one. After he has chatted with them about the assignment and the

client organization, its history and its people, he asks (though

rarely, of course, in these words), “And what do you do that

justifies your being on the payroll?” The great majority, he

reports, answer, “I run the accounting department,” or “I am in

charge of the sales force.” Indeed, not uncommonly the answer is,

“I have eight hundred and fifty people working under me.” Only a

few say, “It’s my job to give our managers the information they

need to make the right decisions,” or “I am responsible for

finding out what products the customer will want tomorrow,” or “I

have to think through and prepare the decisions the president will

have to face tomorrow.”

The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward

authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and

rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes

responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most

literal sense of the phrase, “top management.” He holds himself

accountable for the performance of the whole.

Own Commitment

The focus on contribution turns one’s attention away from his

own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department, and

toward the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the

outside, the only place where there are results. He is likely to

have to think through what relationships his skills, his

specialty, his function, or his department have to the entire

organization and its purpose. He therefore will also come to think

in terms of the customer, the client, or the patient, who is the

ultimate reason for whatever the organization produces, whether it

be economic goods, governmental policies, or health services. As a

result, what he does and how he does it will be materially

different.

A large scientific agency of the U.S. government found this out

a few years ago. The old director of publications retired. He had

been with the agency since its inception in the 1930s and was

neither scientist nor trained writer. The publications that he

turned out were often criticized for lacking professional polish.

He was replaced by an accomplished science writer. The

publications immediately took on a highly professional look. But

the scientific community for whom these publications were intended

stopped reading them. A highly respected university scientist, who

had for many years worked closely with the agency, finally told

the administrator, “The former director was writing for us; your

new man writes at us.”

The old director had asked the question, “What can I contribute

to the results of this agency?” His answer was, “I can interest

the young scientists on the outside in our work, can make them

want to come to work for us.” He therefore stressed major

problems, major decisions, and even major controversies inside the

agency. This had brought him more than once into head-on collision

with the administrator. But the old man had stood by his guns.

“The test of our publications is not whether we like them; the

test is how many young scientists apply to us for jobs and how

good they are,” he said.

To ask, “What can I contribute?” is to look for the unused

potential in the job. And what is considered excellent performance

in a good many positions is often but a pale shadow of the job’s

full potential of contribution.

Knowledge workers who do not ask themselves, “What can I

contribute?” are not only likely to aim too low, they are likely

to aim at the wrong things. Above all, they may define their

contribution too narrowly.

“Contribution” may mean different things. For every

organization needs performance in three major areas: direct

results, building of values and their reaffirmation, and building

and developing people for tomorrow. If deprived of performance in

any one of these areas, it will decay and die. All three therefore

have to be built into the contribution of every knowledge worker.

But their relative importance varies greatly with the personality

and the position of the knowledge worker as well as with the needs

of the organization.

The direct results of an organization are clearly visible, as a

rule. In a business, they are economic results such as sales and

profits; in a hospital, they are patient care; and so on. But

sometimes even direct results are not totally unambiguous. And

when there is confusion as to what they should be, there are no

results.

Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an

organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of

the human body. But any organization also needs a commitment to

values and their constant reaffirmation, as a human body needs

vitamins and minerals. There has to be something “this

organization stands for,” or else it degenerates into

disorganization, confusion, and paralysis. In a business, the

value commitment may be to technical leadership or (as in Sears,

Roebuck) to finding the right goods and services for the American

family and to procuring them at the lowest price and the best

quality.

Value commitments, like results, are not unambiguous.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has for many years been torn

between two fundamentally incompatible value commitments—one to

agricultural productivity and one to the “family farm” as the

“backbone of the nation.” The former has been pushing the country

toward industrial agriculture, highly mechanical, highly

industrialized, and essentially a large-scale commercial business.

The latter has called for nostalgia supporting a nonproducing

rural proletariat. But because farm policy—at least until very

recently—has wavered between two different value commitments, all

it has really succeeded in doing has been to spend prodigious

amounts of money.

Finally, organization is, to a large extent, a means of

overcoming the limitations mortality sets to what any one person

can contribute. An organization that is not capable of

perpetuating itself has failed. An organization therefore has to

provide today the men and women who can run it tomorrow. It has to

renew its human capital. It should steadily upgrade its human

resources. The next generation should take for granted what the

hard work and dedication of this generation has accomplished. They

should then, standing on the shoulders of their predecessors,

establish a new “high” as the baseline for the generation after

them.

An organization that just perpetuates today’s level of vision,

excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt. And

since the one and only thing certain in human affairs is change,

it will not be capable of survival in a changed tomorrow.

Focus on contribution by itself is a powerful force in

developing people. People adjust to the level of the demands made

on them. One who sets his sights on contribution raises the sights

and standards of everyone with whom he works.

A new hospital administrator, holding his first staff meeting,

thought that a rather difficult matter had been settled to

everyone’s satisfaction when one of the participants suddenly

asked, “Would this have satisfied Nurse Bryan?” At once the

argument started all over and did not subside until a new and much

more ambitious solution to the problem had been hammered out.

Nurse Bryan, the administrator learned, had been a long-serving

nurse at the hospital. She was not particularly distinguished, had

not in fact ever been a supervisor. But whenever a decision on a

patient’s care came up on her floor, Nurse Bryan would ask, “Are

we doing the best we can do to help this patient?” Patients on

Nurse Bryan’s floor did better and recovered faster. Gradually

over the years, the whole hospital had learned to adopt what came

to be known as Nurse Bryan’s Rule; had learned, in other words, to

ask, “Are we really making the best contribution to the purpose of

this hospital?”

Though Nurse Bryan herself had retired almost ten years

earlier, the standards she had set still made demands on people

who in terms of training and position were her superiors.

Commitment to contribution is commitment to responsible

effectiveness. Without it, a person shortchanges himself, deprives

his organization, and cheats the people he works with.

The most common cause of failure is inability or unwillingness

to change with the demands of a new position. The knowledge worker

who keeps on doing what he has done successfully before he moved

is almost bound to fail. Not only do the results change to which

his contribution ought to direct itself. The relative importance

among the three dimensions of performance changes. The knowledge

worker who fails to understand this will suddenly do the wrong

things the wrong way—even though he does exactly what in his old

job had been the right things done the right way.

Contribution of Knowledges

For the knowledge worker to focus on contribution is

particularly important. This alone can enable him to contribute at

all.

Knowledge workers do not produce a “thing.” They produce ideas,

information, concepts. The knowledge worker, moreover, is usually

a specialist. In fact, he can, as a rule, be effective only if he

has learned to do one thing very well, that is, if he has

specialized. By itself, however, a specialty is a fragment and

sterile. Its output has to be put together with the output of

other specialists before it can produce results.

The task is not to breed generalists. It is to enable the

specialist to make himself and his specialty effective. This means

that he must think through who is to use his output and what the

user needs to know and to understand to be able to make productive

the fragment the specialist produces.

The person of knowledge has always been expected to take

responsibility for being understood. It is barbarian arrogance to

assume that the layman can or should make the effort to understand

the specialist, and that it is enough if the person of knowledge

talks to a handful of fellow experts who are his peers. Even in

the university or in the research laboratory, this attitude—alas,

only too common today—condemns the expert to uselessness and

converts his knowledge from learning into pedantry. If a person

wants to be an executive—that is, if he wants to be considered

responsible for his contribution—he has to concern himself with

the usability of his “product”—that is, his knowledge.

Effective knowledge workers know this. For they are almost

imperceptibly led by their upward orientation into finding out

what the other fellow needs, what the other fellow sees, and what

the other fellow understands. Effective people find themselves

asking other people in the organization, their superiors, their

subordinates, but above all, their colleagues in other areas,

“What contribution from me do you require to make your

contribution to the organization? When do you need this, how do

you need it, and in what form?”

The person who takes responsibility for his contribution will

relate his narrow area to a genuine whole. He may never himself be

able to integrate a number of knowledge areas into one. But he

soon realizes that he has to learn enough of the needs, the

directions, the limitations, and the perceptions of others to

enable them to use his own work. Even if this does not make him

appreciate the richness and the excitement of diversity, it will

give him immunity against the arrogance of the learned—that

degenerative disease that destroys knowledge and deprives it of

beauty and effectiveness.

The Right Human Relations

Knowledge workers in an organization do not have good human

relations because they have a “talent for people.” They have good

human relations because they focus on contribution in their own

work and in their relationships with others. As a result, their

relationships are productive—and this is the only valid definition

of “good human relations.” Warm feelings and pleasant words are

meaningless, are indeed a false front for wretched attitudes, if

there is no achievement in what is, after all, a work-focused and

task-focused relationship. On the other hand, an occasional rough

word will not disturb a relationship that produces results and

accomplishments for all concerned.

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic

requirements of effective human relations:

Communications

Teamwork

Self-development

Development of others

1. Communications have been in the center of managerial

attention these last twenty years or more. In business, in public

administration, in armed services, in hospitals, in other words in

all the major institutions of modern society, there has been great

concern with communications.

Results to date have been meager. Communications are by and

large just as poor today as they were twenty or thirty years ago

when we first became aware of the need for, and lack of, adequate

communications in the modern organization. But we are beginning to

understand why this massive communications effort cannot produce

results.

We have been working at communications downward from management

to the employees, from the superior to the subordinate. But

communications are practically impossible if they are based on the

downward relationship. This much we have learned from our work in

perception and communications theory. The harder the superior

tries to say something to his subordinate, the more likely is it

that the subordinate will mishear. He will hear what he expects to

hear rather than what is being said.

But knowledge workers who take responsibility for contribution

in their own work will as a rule demand that their subordinates

take responsibility, too. They will tend to ask their

subordinates: “What are the contributions for which this

organization and I, your superior, should hold you accountable?

What should we expect of you? What is the best utilization of your

knowledge and your ability?” And then communication becomes

possible, becomes indeed easy.

Once the subordinate has thought through what contribution

should be expected of him or her, the superior has, of course,

both the right and the responsibility to judge the validity of the

proposed contribution. According to all our experience, the

objectives set by subordinates for themselves are almost never

what the superior thought they should be. The subordinates or

juniors, in other words, do see reality quite differently. And the

more capable they are, the more willing to take responsibility,

the more will their perception of reality and of its objective

opportunities and needs differ from the view of their superior or

of the organization. But any discrepancy between their conclusions

and what their superior expected will stand out strongly.

Who is right in such a difference is not as a rule important.

For effective communication in meaningful terms has already been

established.

2. The focus on contribution leads to communications sideways

and thereby makes teamwork possible.

The question, “Who has to use my output for it to become

effective?” immediately shows up the importance of people who are

not in line of authority, either upward or downward, from and to

the individual executive. It underlines what is the reality of a

knowledge organization: the effective work is actually done in and

by teams of people of diverse knowledges and skills. Those people

have to work together voluntarily and according to the logic of

the situation and the demands of the task, rather than according

to a formal jurisdictional structure.

In a hospital, for instance—perhaps the most complex of the

modern knowledge organizations—nurses, dieticians, physical

therapists, medical and X-ray technicians, pharmacologists,

pathologists, and a host of other health-service professionals

have to work on and with the same patient, with a minimum of

conscious command or control by anyone. And yet they have to work

together for a common end and in line with a general plan of

action: the doctor’s prescription for treatment. In terms of

organizational structure, each of these health-service

professionals reports to his own chief. Each operates in terms of

his own highly specialized field of knowledge; that is, as a

“professional.” But each has to keep all the others informed

according to the specific situation, the condition, and the need

of an individual patient. Otherwise, their efforts are more likely

to do harm than good.

In a hospital in which the focus on contribution has become

ingrained habit, there is almost no difficulty in achieving such

teamwork. In other hospitals this sideways communication, this

spontaneous self-organization into the right task-focused teams,

does not occur despite frantic efforts to obtain communications

and coordination through all kinds of committees, staff

conferences, bulletins, sermons, and the like.

3. Individual self-development in large measure depends on the

focus on contributions.

The man who asks of himself, What is the most important

contribution I can make to the performance of this organization?

asks in effect, What self-development do I need? What knowledge

and skill do I have to acquire to make the contribution I should

be making? What strengths do I have to put to work? What standards

do I have to set myself?

4. The executive who focuses on contribution also stimulates

others to develop themselves, whether they are subordinates,

colleagues, or superiors. He sets standards that are not personal

but grounded in the requirements of the task. At the same time,

they are demands for excellence. For they are demands for high

aspiration, for ambitious goals, and for work of great impact.

We know very little about self-development. But we do know one

thing: people in general, and knowledge workers in particular,

grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow

according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment.

If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If

they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant

stature—without any more effort than is expended by the

nonachievers.

15.

KNOW YOUR STRENGTHS

AND VALUES

More and more people in the workforce—and most knowledge

workers—will have to manage themselves. They will have to place

themselves where they can make the greatest contribution; they

will have to learn to develop themselves. They will have to learn

to stay young and mentally alive during a fifty-year working life.

They will have to learn how and when to change what they do, how

they do it, and when they do it.

Knowledge workers are likely to outlive their employing

organization. Even if knowledge workers postpone entry into the

labor force as long as possible—if, for instance, they stay in

school till their late twenties to get a doctorate—they are

likely, with present life expectancies in the developed countries,

to live into their eighties. And they are likely to have to keep

working, if only part-time, until they are around seventy-five or

older. The average working life, in other words, is likely to be

fifty years, especially for knowledge workers. But the average

life expectancy of a successful business is only thirty years—and

in a period of great turbulence such as the one we are living in,

it is unlikely to be even that long. Increasingly, therefore,

workers, and especially knowledge workers, will outlive any one

employer, and will have to be prepared for more than one job, more

than one assignment, more than one career.

What Are My Strengths?

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are

usually wrong. People know what they are not good at more

often—and even there people are more often wrong than right. And

yet, one can only perform with one’s strengths. One cannot build

performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at

all.

For the great majority of people, to know their strengths was

irrelevant only a few decades ago. One was born into a job and

into a line of work. The peasant’s son became a peasant. If he was

not good at being a peasant, he failed. The artisan’s son was

similarly going to be an artisan, and so on. But now people have

choices. They therefore have to know their strengths so that they

can know where they belong.

There is only one way to find out: the feedback analysis.

Whenever one makes a key decision, and whenever one does a key

action, one writes down what one expects will happen. And nine

months or twelve months later, one then feeds back from results to

expectations. I have been doing this for some fifteen to twenty

years now. And every time I do it, I am surprised. And so is every

one who has ever done this.

Within a fairly short period of time, maybe two or three years,

this simple procedure will tell people first where their strengths

are—and this is probably the most important thing to know about

oneself. It will show them what they do or fail to do that

deprives them of the full yield from their strengths. It will show

them where they are not particularly competent. And finally it

will show them where they have no strengths and cannot perform.

Several action conclusions follow from the feedback analysis.

The first, and most important, conclusion: Concentrate on your

strengths. Place yourself where your strengths can produce

performance and results.

Second: Work on improving your strengths. The feedback analysis

rapidly shows where a person needs to improve skills or has to

acquire new knowledge. It will show where existing skills and

knowledge are no longer adequate and have to be updated. It will

also show the gaps in one’s knowledge.

And one can usually acquire enough of any skill or knowledge

not to be incompetent in it.

Of particular importance is the third conclusion: Identify

where intellectual arrogance causes disabling ignorance. The

feedback analysis soon identifies these areas. Far too many

people—and especially people with high knowledge in one area—are

contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being

“bright” is a substitute for knowing. And then the feedback

analysis soon shows that a main reason for poor performance is the

result of simply not knowing enough, or the result of being

contemptuous of knowledge outside one’s own specialty.

An equally important action conclusion is: Remedy your bad

habits—things you do or fail to do that inhibit your effectiveness

and performance. They quickly show up in the feedback analysis.

But the analysis may also show that a person fails to obtain

results because he or she lacks manners. Bright people—especially

bright young people—often do not understand that manners are the

“lubricating oil” of an organization.

The next action conclusion from the feedback analysis involves

what not to do.

Feeding back from results to expectations soon shows where a

person should not try to do anything at all. It shows the areas in

which a person lacks the minimum endowment needed—and there are

always many such areas for any person. Not enough people have even

one first-rate skill or knowledge area, but all of us have an

infinite number of areas in which we have no talent, no skill, and

little chance to become even mediocre. And in these areas a

person—and especially a knowledge worker—should not take on work,

jobs, assignments.

The final action conclusion is: Waste as little effort as

possible on improving areas of low competence. Concentration

should be on areas of high competence and high skill. It takes far

more energy and far more work to improve from incompetence to low

mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to

excellence. And yet most people—and equally most teachers and most

organizations—try to concentrate on making an incompetent person

into a low mediocrity. The energy and resources—and time—should

instead go into making a competent person into a star performer.

How Do I Perform?

How do I perform? is as important a question—and especially for

knowledge workers—as What are my strengths?

In fact, it may be an even more important question. Amazingly

few people know how they get things done. Most of us do not even

know that different people work and perform differently. They

therefore work in ways that are not their ways—and that almost

guarantees nonperformance.

Like one’s strengths, how one performs is individual. It is

personality. Whether personality be “nature” or “nurture,” it

surely is formed long before the person goes to work. And how a

person performs is a “given,” just as what a person is good at or

not good at is a “given.” It can be modified, but it is unlikely

to be changed. And just as people achieve results by doing what

they are good at, people also achieve results by performing how

they perform.

The feedback analysis may indicate that there is something

amiss in how one performs. But rarely does it identify the cause.

It is, however, normally not too difficult to find out. It takes a

few years of work experience. And then one can ask—and quickly

answer—how one performs. For a few common personality traits

usually determine how one achieves results.

The first thing to know about how one performs is whether one

is a reader or a listener. Yet very few people even know that

there are readers and there are listeners, and that very few

people are both. Even fewer know which of the two they themselves

are. But few things are as damaging as not to know whether one is

a reader or a listener.

The second thing to know about how one performs is to know how

one learns. There things may be even worse than they are in

respect to readers and listeners. For schools everywhere are

organized on the totally erroneous assumption that there is one

right way to learn, and that it is the same way for everybody.

Here is an example of one of the different ways in which people

learn.

Beethoven left behind an enormous number of notebooks. Yet he

himself said that he never looked at a notebook when he actually

wrote his compositions. When asked, “Why then, do you keep a

notebook?” he is reported to have answered, “If I don’t write it

down immediately, I forget it right away. If I put it into a

notebook, I never forget it, and I never have to look it up

again.”

There are probably half a dozen different ways to learn. There

are people who learn by taking copious notes—the way Beethoven

did. But Alfred Sloan never took a note in a meeting. There are

people who learn by hearing themselves talk. There are people who

learn by writing. There are people who learn by doing. And in an

informal survey I once took of professors in American universities

who successfully publish scholarly books of wide appeal, I was

told again and again, “To hear myself talk is the reason why I

teach; because then I can write.”

Actually, of all the important pieces of self-knowledge, this

is one of the easiest to acquire. When I ask people, “How do you

learn?” most of them know it. But when I then ask, “Do you act on

this knowledge?” few reply that they do. And yet to act on this

knowledge is the key to performance—or rather not to act on this

knowledge is to condemn oneself to nonperformance.

How do I perform? and How do I learn? are the most important

first questions to ask. But they are by no means the only ones. To

manage oneself, one has to ask, Do I work well with people, or am

I a loner? And if one finds out that one works well with people,

one asks, In what relationship do I work well with people?

Some people work best as team members. Some people work

exceedingly well as coaches and mentors, and some people are

simply incompetent to be mentors.

Another important thing to know about how one performs is

whether one performs well under stress, or whether one needs a

highly structured and predictable environment. Another trait: Does

one work best as a minnow in a big organization, or as a big fish

in a small organization? Few people work well in both ways. Again

and again people who have been very successful in a large

organization—for example, the General Electric Company or

Citibank—flounder miserably when they move into a small

organization. And again and again people who perform brilliantly

in a small organization flounder miserably when they take a job

with a big organization.

Another crucial question: Do I produce results as a

decision-maker or as an adviser? A great many people perform best

as advisers, but cannot take the burden and pressure of the

decision. A good many people, by contrast, need an adviser to

force themselves to think, but then they can make the decision and

act on it with speed, self-confidence, and courage.

This is a reason, by the way, why the number-two person in an

organization often fails when promoted into the top spot. The top

spot requires a decision-maker. Strong decision-makers in the top

spot often put somebody whom they trust into the number-two spot

as their adviser—and in that position that person is outstanding.

But when then promoted into the number-one spot, the person fails.

He or she knows what the decision should be but cannot take

decision-making responsibility.

The action conclusion: Again, do not try to change yourself—it

is unlikely to be successful. But work, and hard, to improve the

way you perform. And try not to do work of any kind in a way in

which you do not perform, or perform poorly.

What Are My Values?

To be able to manage oneself, one finally has to know, What are

my values?

Organizations have to have values. But so do people. To be

effective in an organization, one’s own values must be compatible

with the organization’s values. They do not need to be the same.

But they must be close enough so that they can coexist. Otherwise,

the person will be frustrated, but also the person will not

produce results.

There rarely is a conflict between a person’s strengths and the

way that person performs. The two are complementary. But there is

sometimes a conflict between a person’s values and the same

person’s strengths. What one does well—even very well—and

successfully may not fit with one’s value system. It may not

appear to that person as making a contribution and as something to

which to devote one’s life (or even a substantial portion

thereof).

If I may inject a personal note: I too, many years ago, had to

decide between what I was doing well and successfully, and my

values. I was doing extremely well as a young investment banker in

London in the mid-1930s; it clearly fitted my strengths. Yet I did

not see myself making a contribution as an asset manager of any

kind. People, I realized, were my values. And I saw no point in

being the richest man in the cemetery. Those were the darkest days

of the Great Depression; I had no money, no job, and no prospects.

But I quit—and it was the right thing.

Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.

Where Do I Belong?

The answers to the three questions, What are my strengths? How

do I perform? and What are my values? should enable the

individual, and especially the individual knowledge worker, to

decide where he or she belongs.

This is not a decision that most people can or should make at

the beginning of their careers. But most people, and especially

highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong till

they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they

should know where their strengths are. They should know how they

perform. And they should know what their values are.

And then they can and should decide where they belong. Or

rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong.

The person who has learned that he or she does not really perform

in a big organization should have learned to say no when offered a

position in a big organization. The person who has learned that he

or she is not a decision-maker should have learned to say no when

offered a decision-making assignment.

But also knowing the answer to these three questions enables

people to say to an opportunity, to an offer, to an assignment,

“Yes, I’ll do that. But this is the way I should be doing it. This

is the way it should be structured. This is the way my

relationships should be. These are the kinds of results you should

expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am.”

Successful careers are not “planned.” They are the careers of

people who are prepared for the opportunity because they know

their strengths, the way they work, and their values. For knowing

where one belongs makes ordinary people—hardworking, competent,

but mediocre otherwise—into outstanding performers.

16.

KNOW YOUR TIME

Most discussions of the knowledge worker’s task start with the

advice to plan one’s work. This sounds eminently plausible. The

only thing wrong with it is that it rarely works. The plans always

remain on paper, always remain good intentions. They seldom turn

into achievement.

Effective knowledge workers, in my observation, do not start

with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not

start out with planning. They start by finding out where their

time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to

cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they

consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible

continuing units. This three-step process:

Recording time

Managing time

Consolidating time

is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

Effective people know that time is the limiting factor. The

output limits of any process are set by the scarcest resource. In

the process we call “accomplishment,” that resource is time.

Time is also a unique resource. One cannot rent, hire, buy, or

otherwise obtain more time.

The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the

demand, the supply will not increase. There is no price for it and

no marginal utility curve for it. Moreover, time is totally

perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever

and will never come back. Time is, therefore, always in

exceedingly short supply.

Time is totally irreplaceable. Within limits we can substitute

one resource for another, copper for aluminum, for instance. We

can substitute capital for human labor. We can use more knowledge

or more brawn. But there is no substitute for time.

Everything requires time. It is the one truly universal

condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most

people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary

resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective

executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

Man is ill-equipped to manage his time. Even in total darkness,

most people retain their sense of space. But even with the lights

on, a few hours in a sealed room render most people incapable of

estimating how much time has elapsed. They are as likely to

underrate grossly the time spent in the room as to overrate it

grossly.

If we rely on our memory, therefore, we do not know how time

has been spent.

I sometimes ask executives who pride themselves on their memory

to put down their guess as to how they spend their own time. Then

I lock these guesses away for a few weeks or months. In the

meantime, the executives run an actual time record on themselves.

There is never much resemblance between the way these people

thought they used their time and their actual records.

One company chairman was absolutely certain that he divided his

time roughly into three parts. One third he thought he was

spending with his senior men. One-third he thought he spent with

his important customers. And one-third he thought was devoted to

community activities. The actual record of his activities over six

weeks brought out clearly that he spent almost no time in any of

these areas. These were the tasks on which he knew he should spend

time—and therefore memory, obliging as usual, told him that they

were the tasks on which he actually had spent his time. The record

showed, however, that he spent most of his hours as a kind of

dispatcher, keeping track of orders from customers he personally

knew, and bothering the plant with telephone calls about them.

Most of those orders were going through all right anyhow and his

intervention could only delay them. But when his secretary first

came in with the time record, he did not believe her. It took two

or three more time logs to convince him that the record, rather

than his memory, had to be trusted when it came to the use of

time.

The effective person therefore knows that to manage his time,

he first has to know where it actually goes.

The Time Demands

There are constant pressures toward unproductive and wasteful

time-use. Any knowledge worker, whether he is a manager or not,

has to spend a great deal of his time on things that do not

contribute at all. Much is inevitably wasted. The higher up in the

organization he is, the more demands on his time will the

organization make.

The head of a large company once told me that in two years as

chief executive officer he had eaten out every evening except on

Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. All the other dinners were

“official” functions, each of which wasted several hours. Yet he

saw no possible alternative. Whether the dinner honored an

employee retiring after fifty years of service, or the governor of

one of the states in which the company did business, the chief

executive officer had to be there. Ceremony is one of his tasks.

My friend had no illusions that these dinners contributed anything

either to the company or to his own entertainment or

self-development. Yet he had to be there and dine graciously.

Similar time-wasters abound in the life of every knowledge

worker. When a company’s best customer calls up, the sales manager

cannot say, “I am busy.” He has to listen, even though all the

customer wants to talk about may be a bridge game the preceding

Saturday or the chances of his daughter’s getting into the right

college. The hospital administrator has to attend the meetings of

every one of his staff committees, or else the physicians, the

nurses, the technicians, and other staff members will feel that

they are being slighted. The government administrator had better

pay attention when a congressman calls and wants some information

he could, in less time, get out of the telephone book or the World

Almanac. And so it goes all day long.

Nonmanagers are no better off. They too are bombarded with

demands on their time that add little, if anything, to their

productivity, and yet cannot be disregarded.

In every job, a large part of the time must therefore be wasted

on things that, though they apparently have to be done, contribute

nothing or little.

Yet most of the tasks of the knowledge worker require, for

minimum effectiveness, a fairly large quantum of time. To spend in

one stretch less than this minimum is sheer waste. One

accomplishes nothing and has to begin all over again.

To write a report may, for instance, require six or eight

hours, at least for the first draft. It is pointless to give seven

hours to the task by spending fifteen minutes twice a day for

three weeks. All one has at the end is blank paper with some

doodles on it. But if one can lock the door, disconnect the

telephone, and sit down to wrestle with the report for five or six

hours without interruption, one has a good chance to come up with

what I call a “zero draft”—the one before the first draft. From

then on, one can indeed work in fairly small installments, can

rewrite, correct, and edit section by section, paragraph by

paragraph, sentence by sentence.

The same goes for an experiment. One simply has to have five to

twelve hours in a single stretch to set up the apparatus and to do

at least one completed run. Or one has to start all over again

after an interruption.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every

executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly

large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his

disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive

number of hours.

This is particularly true with respect to time spent working

with people, which is, of course, a central task in the work of

the executive. People are time-consumers. And most people are

time-wasters.

To spend a few minutes with people is simply not productive. If

one wants to get anything across, one has to spend a fairly large

minimum quantum of time. The knowledge worker who thinks that he

can discuss the plans, direction, and performance of one of his

subordinates in fifteen minutes—and many managers believe this—is

just deceiving himself. If one wants to get to the point of having

an impact, one needs probably at least an hour and usually much

more. And if one has to establish a human relationship, one needs

infinitely more time.

Relations with other knowledge workers are especially

time-consuming. Whatever the reason—whether it is the absence of

the barrier of class and authority between superior and

subordinate in knowledge work, or whether he simply takes himself

more seriously—the knowledge worker makes much greater time

demands than the manual worker on his superior as well as on his

associates. Moreover, because knowledge work cannot be measured

the way manual work can, one cannot tell a knowledge worker in a

few simple words whether he is doing the right job and how well he

is doing it. One can say to a manual worker, “Our work standard

calls for fifty pieces an hour, and you are only turning out

forty-two.” One has to sit down with a knowledge worker and think

through with him what should be done and why, before one can even

know whether he is doing a satisfactory job or not. And that is

time-consuming.

Since the knowledge worker directs himself, he must understand

what achievement is expected of him and why. He must also

understand the work of the people who have to use his knowledge

output. For this, he needs a good deal of information, discussion,

instruction—all things that take time. And contrary to common

belief, this time demand is made not only on his superior but

equally on his colleagues.

The knowledge worker must be focused on the results and

performance goals of the entire organization to have any results

and performance at all. This means that he has to set aside time

to direct his vision from his work to results, and from his

specialty to the outside in which alone performance lies.

Wherever knowledge workers perform well in large organizations,

senior executives take time out, on a regular schedule, to sit

down with them, sometimes all the way down to green juniors, and

ask, “What should we at the head of this organization know about

your work? What do you want to tell me regarding this

organization? Where do you see opportunities we do not exploit?

Where do you see dangers to which we are still blind? And, all

together, what do you want to know from me about the

organization?”

This leisurely exchange is needed equally in a government

agency and in a business, in a research lab and in an army staff.

Without it, the knowledge people either lose enthusiasm and become

time-servers, or they direct their energies toward their specialty

and away from the opportunities and needs of the organization. But

such a session takes a great deal of time, especially as it should

be unhurried and relaxed. People must feel that “we have all the

time in the world.” This actually means that one gets a great deal

done fast. But it means also that one has to make available a good

deal of time in one chunk and without too much interruption.

Mixing personal relations and work relations is time-consuming.

If hurried, it turns into friction. Yet any organization rests on

this mixture. The more people are together, the more time will

their sheer interaction take, the less time will be available to

them for work, accomplishment, and results.

The larger the organization, therefore, the less actual time

will the knowledge worker have and the more important it will be

for him to know where his time goes and to manage the little time

at his disposal.

The more people there are in an organization, the more often

does a decision on people arise. But fast personnel decisions are

likely to be wrong decisions. The time quantum of the good

personnel decision is amazingly large. What the decision involves

often becomes clear only when one has gone around the same track

several times.

It is not the knowledge workers in the industrial countries of

the world today who have a problem of spending their leisure time.

On the contrary, they are working everywhere longer hours and have

greater demands on their time to satisfy. And the time scarcity is

bound to become worse rather than better.

One important reason for this is that a high standard of living

presupposes an economy of innovation and change. But innovation

and change make inordinate time demands on the executive. All one

can think and do in a short time is to think what one already

knows and to do as one has always done.

Time Diagnosis

That one has to record time before one can know where it goes

and before, in turn, one can attempt to manage it we have realized

for the best part of a century. That is, we have known this in

respect to manual work, skilled and unskilled, since Scientific

Management around 1900 began to record the time it takes for a

specific piece of manual work to be done. Hardly any country is

today so far behind in industrial methods as not to time

systematically the operations of manual workers.

We have applied this knowledge to the work where time does not

greatly matter, that is, where the difference between time-use and

time-waste is primarily efficiency and costs. But we have not

applied it to the work that matters increasingly, and that

particularly has to cope with time: the work of the knowledge

worker and especially of the executive. Here the difference

between time-use and time-waste is effectiveness and results.

The first step toward effectiveness is therefore to record

actual time-use. The specific method in which the record is put

together need not concern us here. There are executives who keep

such a time log themselves. Others, such as the company chairman

just mentioned, have their secretaries do it for them. The

important thing is that it gets done, and that the record is made

in “real” time, that is, at the time of the event itself, rather

than later on from memory.

A good many effective people keep such a log continually and

look at it regularly every month. At a minimum, effective

executives have the log run on themselves for three to four weeks

at a stretch twice a year or so, on a regular schedule. After each

such sample, they rethink and rework their schedule. But six

months later they invariably find that they have “drifted” into

wasting their time on trivia.

Time-use does improve with practice. But only constant efforts

at managing time can prevent drifting. Systematic time management

is therefore the next step. One has to find the nonproductive,

time-wasting activities and get rid of them if one possibly can.

This requires asking oneself a number of diagnostic questions.

1. First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that

need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time

without any results whatever. To find these time-wastes, one asks

of all activities in the time records, What would happen if this

were not done at all? And if the answer is, Nothing would happen,

then obviously the conclusion is to stop doing it.

It is amazing how many things busy people are doing that never

will be missed. There are, for instance, the countless speeches,

dinners, committee meetings, and board meetings, which take an

unconscionable toll of the time of busy people, which are rarely

enjoyed by them or done well by them, but which are endured, year

in and year out, as an Egyptian plague ordained from on high.

Actually, all one has to do is to learn to say no if an activity

contributes nothing to one’s own organization, to oneself, or to

the organization for which it is to be performed.

The chief executive mentioned above who had to dine out every

night found, when he analyzed these dinners, that at least

one-third would proceed just as well without anyone from the

company’s senior management. In fact, he found (somewhat to his

chagrin) that his acceptance of a good many of these invitations

was by no means welcome to his hosts. They had invited him as a

polite gesture. But they had fully expected to be turned down and

did not quite know what to do with him when he accepted.

I have yet to see a knowledge worker, regardless of rank or

station, who could not consign something like a quarter of the

demands on his time to the wastepaper basket without anybody’s

noticing their disappearance.

2. The next question is, Which of the activities on my time log

could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?

The dinner-eating company chairman found that any senior

executive of the company would do for another third of the formal

dinners—all the occasion demanded was the company’s name on the

guest list.

But I have never seen a knowledge worker confronted with his

time record who did not rapidly acquire the habit of pushing at

other people everything that he need not do personally. The first

look at the time record makes it abundantly clear that there just

is not time enough to do the things he himself considers

important, himself wants to do, and is himself committed to doing.

The only way he can get to the important things is by pushing on

others anything at all that can be done by them.

“Delegation,” as the term is customarily used, is a misnomer in

this situation. But getting rid of anything that can be done by

somebody else so that one does not have to delegate but can really

get to one’s own work—that is a major improvement in

effectiveness.

3. A common cause of time-waste is largely under the

executive’s control and can be eliminated by him. That is the time

of others he himself wastes.

There is no one symptom for this. But there is still a simple

way to find out how and when it occurs. That is to ask other

people. Effective people have learned to ask systematically and

without coyness, “What do I do that wastes your time without

contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask such a question, and

to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the

effective executive.

The manner in which an executive does productive work may still

be a major waste of somebody’s else’s time.

The senior financial executive of a large organization knew

perfectly well that the meetings in his office wasted a lot of

time. This man asked all his direct subordinates to every meeting,

whatever the topic. As a result, the meetings were far too large.

And because every participant felt that he had to show interest,

everybody asked at least one question—most of them irrelevant—and

the meetings stretched on endlessly. But the senior executive had

not known, until he asked, that his subordinates too considered

the meetings a waste of their time. Aware of the great importance

everyone in the organization placed on status and on being “in the

know,” he had feared that anyone not invited would feel slighted

and left out.

Now, however, he satisfies the status needs of his subordinates

in a different manner. He sends out a printed form that reads: “I

have asked [Messrs. Smith, Jones, and Robinson] to meet with me

[Wednesday at 3] in [the fourth-floor conference room] to discuss

[next year’s capital-appropriations budget]. Please come if you

think that you need the information or want to take part in the

discussion. But you will in any event receive right away a full

summary of the discussion and of any decisions reached, together

with a request for your comments.”

Where formerly a dozen people came and stayed all afternoon,

three men and a secretary to take the minutes now get the matter

over with in an hour or so. And no one feels left out.

Many knowledge workers know all about these unproductive and

unnecessary time demands; yet they are afraid to prune them. They

are afraid to cut out something important by mistake. But such a

mistake, if made, can be speedily corrected. If one prunes too

harshly, one usually finds out fast enough.

But the best proof that the danger of overpruning is a bugaboo

is the extraordinary effectiveness so often attained by severely

ill or severely handicapped people.

A good example was Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s

confidential adviser in World War II. A dying, indeed almost a

dead man for whom every step was torment, he could only work a few

hours every other day or so. This forced him to cut out everything

but truly vital matters. He did not lose effectiveness thereby; on

the contrary, he became, as Churchill called him once, “Lord Heart

of the Matter” and accomplished more than anyone else in wartime

Washington.

Pruning the Time-Wasters

The three diagnostic questions deal with unproductive and

time-consuming activities over which every knowledge worker has

some control. Every knowledge worker should ask them. Managers,

however, need to be equally concerned with time-loss that results

from poor management and deficient organization. Poor management

wastes everybody’s time—but above all, it wastes the manager’s

time. Four major time-wasters caused by management and

organizational deficiency are discussed below.

1. The first organizational time-wasters result from lack of

system or foresight.

The symptom to look for is the recurrent “crisis,” the crisis

that comes back year after year. A crisis that recurs a second

time is a crisis that must not occur again.

The annual inventory crisis belongs here. That with the

computer we now can meet it even more “heroically” and at greater

expense than we could in the past is hardly a great improvement.

A recurrent crisis should always have been foreseen. It can

therefore either be prevented or reduced to a routine that clerks

can manage. The definition of a “routine” is that it makes

unskilled people without judgment capable of doing what it took

near-genius to do before; for a routine puts down in systematic,

step-by-step form what a very able man learned in surmounting

yesterday’s crisis.

The recurrent crisis is not confined to the lower levels of an

organization. It afflicts everyone.

For years, a fairly large company ran into one of these crises

annually around the first of December. In a highly seasonal

business, with the last quarter usually the year’s low,

fourth-quarter sales and profits were not easily predictable.

Every year, however, management made an earnings prediction when

it issued its interim report at the end of the second quarter.

Three months later, in the fourth quarter, there was tremendous

scurrying and companywide emergency action to live up to top

management’s forecast. For three to five weeks, nobody in the

management group got any work done. It took only one stroke of the

pen to solve this crisis; instead of predicting a definite

year-end figure, top management is now predicting results within a

range. That fully satisfies directors, stockholders, and the

financial community. And what used to be a crisis a few years ago,

now is no longer even noticed in the company—yet fourth-quarter

results are quite a bit better than they used to be, since

executive time is no longer being wasted on making results fit the

forecast.

Prior to Robert McNamara’s appointment as secretary of defense

in 1961, a similar last-minute crisis shook the entire American

defense establishment every spring, toward the end of the fiscal

year on June 30. Every manager in the defense establishment,

military or civilian, tried desperately in May and June to find

expenditures for the money appropriated by Congress for the fiscal

year. Otherwise, he was afraid he would have to give back the

money. (This last-minute spending spree has also been a chronic

disease in Russian planning.) And yet this crisis was totally

unnecessary, as Mr. McNamara immediately saw. The law had always

permitted the placing of unspent, but needed, sums into an interim

account.

The recurrent crisis is simply a symptom of slovenliness and

laziness.

Years ago when I first started out as a consultant, I had to

learn how to tell a well-managed industrial plant from a poorly

managed one—without any pretense to production knowledge. A

well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory

that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is

unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A

well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it

because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted

into routine.

Similarly a well-managed organization is a “dull” organization.

The “dramatic” things in such an organization are basic decisions

that make the future, rather than heroics in mopping up

yesterday’s mistakes.

2. Time-waste often results from overstaffing.

A workforce may, indeed, be too small for the task. And the

work then suffers, if it gets done at all. But this is not the

rule. Much more common is the workforce that is too big for

effectiveness, the workforce that spends, therefore, an increasing

amount of its time “interacting” rather than working.

There is a fairly reliable symptom of overstaffing. If the

senior people in the group—and of course the manager in

particular—spend more than a small fraction of their time, maybe

one-tenth, on “problems of human relations,” on feuds and

frictions, on jurisdictional disputes and questions of

cooperation, and so on, then the workforce is almost certainly too

large. People get into each other’s way. People have become an

impediment to performance, rather than the means thereto. In a

lean organization people have room to move without colliding with

one another and can do their work without having to explain it all

the time.

3. Another common time-waster is malorganization. Its symptom

is an excess of meetings.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient

organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do

both at the same time. In an ideally designed structure (which in

a changing world is of course only a dream), there would be no

meetings. Everybody would know what he needs to know to do his

job. Everyone would have the resources available to him to do his

job. We meet because people holding different jobs have to

cooperate to get a specific task done.

But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than

the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is

an organization in which no one gets anything done. Wherever a

time log shows the fatty degeneration of meeting—whenever, for

instance, people in an organization find themselves in meetings a

quarter of their time or more—there is time-wasting

malorganization.

As a rule, meetings should never be allowed to become the main

demand on a knowledge worker’s time. Too many meetings always

bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational

components. Too many meetings signify that work that should be in

one job or in one component is spread over several jobs or several

components. They signify that responsibility is diffused and that

information is not addressed to the people who need it.

4. The last major time-waster is malfunction in information.

The administrator of a large hospital was plagued for years by

telephone calls from doctors asking him to find a bed for one of

their patients who should be hospitalized. The admissions people

“knew” that there was no empty bed. Yet the administrator almost

invariably found a few. The admissions people simply were not

informed immediately when a patient was discharged. The floor

nurse knew, of course, and so did the people in the front office

who presented the bill to the departing patient. The admissions

people, however, got a “bed count” made every morning at 5:00

a.m.––while the great majority of patients were being sent home in

midmorning after the doctors had made the rounds. It did not take

genius to put this right; all it needed was an extra carbon copy

of the chit that goes from the floor nurse to the front office.

Time-wasting management defects such as overstaffing,

malorganization, or malfunctioning information can sometimes be

remedied fast. At other times, it takes long, patient work to

correct them. The results of such work are, however, great––and

especially in terms of time gained.

Consolidating “Discretionary Time”

The executive who records and analyzes his time and then

attempts to manage it can determine how much he has for his

important tasks. How much time is there that is “discretionary,”

that is, available for the big tasks that will really make a

contribution?

It is not going to be a great deal, no matter how ruthlessly

the knowledge worker prunes time-wasters.

The higher up a knowledge worker, the larger will be the

proportion of time that is not under his control and yet not spent

on contribution. The larger the organization, the more time will

be needed just to keep the organization together and running,

rather than to make it function and produce.

The effective people therefore knows that he has to consolidate

his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of

time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one-quarter

of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is

usually enough to get the important things done. But even

three-quarters of the working day are useless if it is only

available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there.

The final step in time management is therefore to consolidate

the time that record and analysis show as normally available and

under the executive’s control.

There are a good many ways of doing this. Some people, usually

senior managers, work at home one day a week; this is a

particularly common method of time consolidation for editors or

research scientists.

Others schedule all the operating work––the meetings, reviews,

problem sessions, and so on––for two days a week, for example,

Monday and Friday, and set aside the mornings of the remaining

days for consistent, continuing work on major issues.

But the method by which one consolidates one’s discretionary

time is far less important than the approach. Most people tackle

the job by trying to push the secondary, the less productive

matters together, thus clearing, so to speak, a free space between

them. This does not lead very far, however. One still gives

priority in one’s mind and in one’s schedule to the less important

things, the things that have to be done even though they

contribute little. As a result, any new time pressure is likely to

be satisfied at the expense of the discretionary time and of the

work that should be done in it. Within a few days or weeks, the

entire discretionary time will then be gone again, nibbled away by

new crises, new immediacies, new trivia.

And all effective people work on their time management

perpetually. They not only keep a continuing log and analyze it

periodically; they set themselves deadlines for the important

activities, based on their judgment of their discretionary time.

One highly effective man I know keeps two such lists—one of the

urgent and one of the unpleasant things that have to be done—each

with a deadline. When he finds his deadlines slipping, he knows

his time is again getting away from him.

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed,

nothing else can be managed. The analysis of one’s time, moreover,

is the one easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyze

one’s work and to think through what really matters in it.

“Know thyself,” the old prescription for wisdom, is almost

impossibly difficult for mortal men. But everyone can follow the

injunction “Know thy time” if he or she wants to, and be well on

the road toward contribution and effectiveness.

17.

EFFECTIVE DECISIONS

Effective people do not make a great many decisions. They

concentrate on the important ones. They try to think through what

is strategic and generic, rather than “solve problems.” They try

to make the few important decisions on the highest level of

conceptual understanding. They try to find the constants in a

situation. They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in

decision-making. Rather, they consider virtuosity in manipulating

a great many variables a symptom of sloppy thinking. They want to

know what the decision is all about and what the underlying

realities are that it has to satisfy. They want impact rather than

technique; they want to be sound rather than clever.

Effective people know when a decision has to be based on

principle and when it should be made on the merits of the case and

pragmatically. They know that the trickiest decision is that

between the right and the wrong compromise and have learned to

tell one from the other. They know that the most time-consuming

step in the process is not making the decision but putting it into

effect. Unless a decision has “degenerated into work,” it is not a

decision; it is at best a good intention. This means that, while

the effective decision itself is based on the highest level of

conceptual understanding, the action to carry it out should be as

close as possible to the working level and as simple as possible.

The least-known of the great American business builders,

Theodore Vail, was perhaps the most effective decision-maker in

U.S. business history. As president of the Bell Telephone System

from just before 1910 till the 1920s, Vail built the organization

into the largest private business in the world and into one of the

most prosperous growth companies.

Alfred P. Sloan Jr., who in General Motors designed and built

the world’s largest manufacturing enterprise, took over as head of

a big business in 1922, when Vail’s career was drawing to its

close. He was a very different man, as his was a very different

time. And yet the decision for which Sloan is best remembered, the

decentralized organizational structure of General Motors, is of

the same kind as the major decisions Theodore Vail had made

somewhat earlier for the Bell Telephone System.

As Sloan has recounted in his book, My Years with General

Motors, the company he took over in 1922 was a loose federation of

almost independent chieftains. Each of these men ran a unit that a

few short years before had still been his own company—and each ran

it as if it were still his own company.

Sloan realized that this was not the peculiar and short-term

problem of the company just created through merger, but a generic

problem of big business.

The Decision Process

The truly important features of the decisions Vail and Sloan

made are neither their novelty nor their controversial nature.

They are:

1. The clear realization that the problem was generic and could

only be solved through a decision that established a rule, a

principle

2. The definition of the specifications that the answer to the

problem had to satisfy, that is, of the “boundary conditions”

3. The thinking through what is “right,” that is, the solution

that will fully satisfy the specifications before attention is

given to the compromises, adaptations, and concessions needed to

make the decision acceptable

4. The building into the decision of the action to carry it out

5. The “feedback” that tests the validity and effectiveness of

the decision against the actual course of events

These are the elements of the effective decision process.

Four Types of Occurrences

1. The first questions the effective decision-maker asks are:

Is this a generic situation or an exception? Is this something

that underlies a great many occurrences? Or is the occurrence a

unique event that needs to be dealt with as such? The generic

always has to be answered through a rule, a principle. The

exceptional can only be handled as such and as it comes.

Strictly speaking, one might distinguish among four, rather

than between two, different types of occurrences.

There is first the truly generic, of which the individual

occurrence is only a symptom.

Most of the problems that come up in the course of the

executive’s work are of this nature. Inventory decisions in a

business, for instance, are not “decisions.” They are adaptations.

The problem is generic. This is even more likely to be true of

events within production.

Typically, a product control and engineering group will handle

many hundreds of problems in the course of a month. Yet, whenever

these are analyzed, the great majority prove to be just

symptoms—that is, manifestations of underlying basic conditions.

The individual process control engineer or production engineer who

works in one part of the plant usually cannot see this. He might

have a few problems each month with the couplings in the pipes

that carry steam or hot liquids. But only when the total workload

of the group over several months is analyzed does the generic

problem appear. Then one sees that temperatures or pressures have

become too great for the existing equipment and that the

couplings, holding different lines together, need to be redesigned

for greater loads. Until this is done, process control will spend

a tremendous amount of time fixing leaks without ever getting

control of the situation.

Then there is the problem that, while a unique event for the

individual institution, is actually generic.

The company that receives an offer to merge from another,

larger one will never receive such an offer again if it accepts.

This is a nonrecurrent situation as far as the individual company,

its board of directors, and its management are concerned. But it

is, of course, a generic situation that occurs all the time. To

think through whether to accept or to reject the offer requires

some general rules. For these, however, one has to look to the

experience of others.

Next there is the truly exceptional, the truly unique event.

The power failure that plunged into darkness the whole of

northeastern North America from the St. Lawrence River to

Washington, D.C., in November 1965 was, according to the first

explanations, a truly exceptional situation. So was the

thalidomide tragedy that led to the birth of so many deformed

babies in the early 1960s. The probability of these events, we

were told, was one in ten million or one in a hundred million.

Such concatenation of malfunctions is as unlikely ever to recur as

it is unlikely, for instance, for the chair on which I sit to

disintegrate into its constituent atoms.

Truly unique events are rare, however. Whenever one appears,

one has to ask, Is this a true exception or only the first

manifestation of a new genus?

And this, the early manifestation of a new generic problem, is

the fourth and last category of events with which the decision

process deals.

We know now, for instance, that both the northeastern power

failure and the thalidomide tragedy were only the first

occurrences of what, under conditions of modern power technology

or of modern pharmacology, are likely to become fairly frequent

malfunctions unless generic solutions are found.

All events but the truly unique require a generic solution.

They require a rule, a policy, a principle. Once the right

principle has been developed, all manifestations of the same

generic situation can be handled pragmatically, that is, by

adaptation of the rule to the concrete circumstances of the case.

Truly unique events, however, must be treated individually. One

cannot develop rules for the exceptional.

The effective decision-maker spends time to determine with

which of these four situations he is dealing. He knows that he

will make the wrong decision if he classifies the situation

wrongly.

By far the most common mistake is to treat a generic situation

as if it were a series of unique events, that is, to be pragmatic

when one lacks the generic understanding and principle. This

inevitably leads to frustration and futility.

Specifications of Decision

2. The second major element in the decision process is clear

specifications as to what the decision has to accomplish. What are

the objectives the decision has to reach? What are the minimum

goals it has to attain? What are the conditions it has to satisfy?

In science these are known as “boundary conditions.” A decision,

to be effective, needs to satisfy the boundary conditions. It

needs to be adequate to its purpose.

The more concisely and clearly boundary conditions are stated,

the greater the likelihood that the decision will indeed be an

effective one and will accomplish what it set out to do.

Conversely, any serious shortfall in defining these boundary

conditions is almost certain to make a decision ineffectual, no

matter how brilliant it may seem.

What is the minimum needed to resolve this problem? is the form

in which the boundary conditions are usually probed. Can our needs

be satisfied? Alfred P. Sloan presumably asked himself when he

took command of General Motors in 1922, by removing the autonomy

of the division heads. His answer was clearly in the negative. The

boundary conditions of his problem demanded strength and

responsibility in the chief operating positions. This was needed

as much as unity and control at the center. The boundary

conditions demanded a solution to a problem of structure, rather

than an accommodation among personalities. And this in turn made

his solution last.

The effective person knows that a decision that does not

satisfy the boundary conditions is ineffectual and inappropriate.

It may be worse indeed than a decision that satisfies the wrong

boundary conditions. Both will be wrong, of course. But one can

salvage the appropriate decision for the incorrect boundary

conditions. It is still an effective decision. One cannot get

anything but trouble from the decision that is inadequate to its

specifications.

In fact, clear thinking about the boundary conditions is needed

so that one knows when a decision has to be abandoned.

But clear thinking about the boundary conditions is needed also

to identify the most dangerous of all possible decisions: the one

that might—just might—work if nothing whatever goes wrong. These

decisions always seem to make sense. But when one thinks through

the specifications they have to satisfy, one always finds that

they are essentially incompatible with each other. That such a

decision might succeed is not impossible—it is merely grossly

improbable. The trouble with miracles is not, after all, that they

happen rarely; it is that one cannot rely on them.

A perfect example was President Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs decision

in 1961. One specification was clearly Castro’s overthrow. But at

the same time, there was another specification: not to make it

appear that U.S. forces were intervening in one of the American

republics. That the second specification was rather absurd, and

that no one in the whole world would have believed for one moment

that the invasion was a spontaneous uprising of the Cubans, is

beside the point. To the American policy-makers at the time, the

appearance of nonintervention seemed a legitimate and indeed a

necessary condition. But these two specifications would have been

compatible with each other only if an immediate islandwide

uprising against Castro would have completely paralyzed the Cuban

army. And this, while not impossible, was clearly not highly

probable in a police state. Either the whole idea should have been

dropped or American full-scale support should have been provided

to ensure success of the invasion.

It is not disrespect for President Kennedy to say that his

mistake was not, as he explained, that he had “listened to the

experts.” The mistake was failure to think through clearly the

boundary conditions that the decision had to satisfy, and refusal

to face up to the unpleasant reality that a decision that has to

satisfy two different and at bottom incompatible specifications is

not a decision but a prayer for a miracle.

Yet, defining the specifications and setting the boundary

conditions cannot be done on the “facts” in any decision of

importance. It always has to be done on interpretation. It is

risk-taking judgment.

Everyone can make the wrong decision—in fact, everyone will

sometimes make a wrong decision. But no one needs to make a

decision that, on its face, falls short of satisfying the boundary

conditions.

What Is Right

3. One has to start out with what is right rather than what is

acceptable (let alone who is right) precisely because one always

has to compromise in the end. But if one does not know what is

right to satisfy the specifications and boundary conditions, one

cannot distinguish between the right compromise and the wrong

compromise—and will end up by making the wrong compromise.

I was taught this when I started in 1944 on my first big

consulting assignment, a study of the management structure and

management policies of the General Motors Corporation. Alfred P.

Sloan Jr., who was then chairman and chief executive officer of

the company, called me to his office at the start of my study and

said, “I shall not tell you what to study, what to write, or what

conclusions to come to. This is your task. My only instruction to

you is to put down what you think is right as you see it. Don’t

you worry about our reaction. Don’t you worry about whether we

will like this or dislike that. And don’t you, above all, concern

yourself with the compromises that might be needed to make your

recommendations acceptable. There is not one executive in this

company who does not know how to make every single conceivable

compromise without any help from you. But he can’t make the right

compromise unless you first tell him what ‘right’ is.” The

executive thinking through a decision might put this in front of

himself in neon lights.

For there are two different kinds of compromise. One kind is

expressed in the old proverb, Half a loaf is better than no bread.

The other kind is expressed in the story of the judgment of

Solomon, which was clearly based on the realization that half a

baby is worse than no baby at all. In the first instance, the

boundary conditions are still being satisfied. The purpose of

bread is to provide food, and half a loaf is still food. Half a

baby, however, does not satisfy the boundary conditions. For half

a baby is not half of a living and growing child. It is a corpse

in two pieces.

It is fruitless and a waste of time to worry about what is

acceptable and what one had better not say so as not to evoke

resistance. The things one worries about never happen. And

objections and difficulties no one thought about suddenly turn out

to be almost insurmountable obstacles. One gains nothing, in other

words, by starting out with the question, What is acceptable? And

in the process of answering it, one gives away the important

things, as a rule, and loses any chance to come up with an

effective, let alone with the right, answer.

Converting into Action

4. Converting the decision into action is the fourth major

element in the decision process. While thinking through the

boundary conditions is the most difficult step in decision-making,

converting the decision into effective action is usually the most

time-consuming one. Yet a decision will not become effective

unless the action commitments have been built into the decision

from the start.

In fact, no decision has been made unless carrying it out in

specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and

responsibility. Until then, there are only good intentions.

This is the trouble with so many policy statements, especially

of business: they contain no action commitment. To carry them out

is no one’s specific work and responsibility. No wonder that the

people in the organization tend to view these statements cynically

if not as declarations of what top management is really not going

to do.

Converting a decision into action requires answering several

distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action

has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have

to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first

and the last of these are too often overlooked—with dire results.

A story that has become a legend among operations researchers

illustrates the importance of the question, Who has to know? A

major manufacturer of industrial equipment decided several years

ago to discontinue one model. For years it had been standard

equipment on a line of machine tools, many of which were still in

use. It was decided, therefore, to sell the model to present

owners of the old equipment for another three years as a

replacement, and then to stop making and selling it. Orders for

this particular model had been going down for a good many years.

But they shot up as former customers reordered against the day

when the model would no longer be available. No one had, however,

asked, Who needs to know of this decision? Therefore, nobody

informed the clerk in the purchasing department who was in charge

of buying the parts from which the model itself was being

assembled. His instructions were to buy parts in a given ratio to

current sales—and the instructions remained unchanged. When the

time came to discontinue further production of the model, the

company had in its warehouse enough parts for another eight to ten

years of production, parts that had to be written off at a

considerable loss.

Feedback

5. Finally, a feedback has to be built into the decision to

provide a continual testing, against actual events, of the

expectations that underlie the decision.

Decisions are made by human beings who are fallible; at their

best their works do not last long. Even the best decision has a

high probability of being wrong. Even the most effective one

eventually becomes obsolete.

When General Eisenhower was elected president, his predecessor,

Harry S. Truman, said, “Poor Ike; when he was a general, he gave

an order and it was carried out. Now he is going to sit in that

big office and he’ll give an order and not a damn thing is going

to happen.”

The reason why “not a damn thing is going to happen” is,

however, not that generals have more authority than presidents. It

is that military organizations learned long ago that futility is

the lot of most orders and organized the feedback to check on the

execution of the order. They learned long ago that to go oneself

and look is the only reliable feedback. Reports—all a president is

normally able to mobilize—are not much help. All military services

have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes

out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. At the

least he sends one of his own aides—he never relies on what he is

told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he

distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to

distrust communications.

This is the reason why a battalion commander is expected to go

out and taste the food served his men. He could, of course, read

the menus and order this or that item to be brought in to him. But

no; he is expected to go into the mess hall and take his sample of

the food from the same kettle that serves the enlisted men.

With the coming of the computer this will become even more

important, for the decision-maker will, in all likelihood, be even

further removed from the scene of action. Unless he accepts, as a

matter of course, that he had better go out and look at the scene

of action, he will be increasingly divorced from reality. All a

computer can handle are abstractions. And abstractions can be

relied on only if they are constantly checked against the

concrete. Otherwise, they are certain to mislead us.

To go and look for oneself is also the best, if not the only,

way to test whether the assumptions on which a decision has been

made are still valid or whether they are becoming obsolete and

need to be thought through again. And one always has to expect the

assumptions to become obsolete sooner or later. Reality never

stands still very long.

One needs organized information for the feedback. One needs

reports and figures. But unless one builds one’s feedback around

direct exposure to reality—unless one disciplines oneself to go

out and look—one condemns oneself to a sterile dogmatism and with

it to ineffectiveness.

Opinions Rather Than Facts

A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives.

It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a

choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more

often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is

provably more nearly right than the other.

Most books on decision-making tell the reader: First find the

facts. But executives who make effective decisions know that one

does not start with facts. One starts with opinions. These are, of

course, nothing but untested hypotheses and, as such, worthless

unless tested against reality. To determine what is a fact

requires first a decision on the criteria of relevance, especially

on the appropriate measurement. This is the hinge of the effective

decision, and usually its most controversial aspect.

Finally, the effective decision does not, as so many texts on

decision-making proclaim, flow from a consensus on the facts. The

understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the

clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of the serious

consideration of competing alternatives.

To get the facts first is impossible. There are no facts unless

one has a criterion of relevance. Events by themselves are not

facts.

People inevitably start out with an opinion; to ask them to

search for the facts first is even undesirable. They will simply

do what everyone is far too prone to do anyhow: look for the facts

that fit the conclusion they have already reached. And no one has

ever failed to find the facts he is looking for. The good

statistician knows this and distrusts all figures—he either knows

the fellow who found them or he does not know him; in either case

he is suspicious.

The only rigorous method, the only one that enables us to test

an opinion against reality, is based on the clear recognition that

opinions come first—and that this is the way it should be. Then no

one can fail to see that we start out with untested hypotheses—in

decision-making as in science the only starting point. We know

what to do with hypotheses—one does not argue them; one tests

them. One finds out which hypotheses are tenable, and therefore

worthy of serious consideration, and which are eliminated by the

first test against observable experience.

The effective person encourages opinions. But he insists that

the people who voice them also think through what it is that the

“experiment”—that is, the testing of the opinion against

reality—would have to show. The effective person, therefore, asks,

What do we have to know to test the validity of this hypothesis?

What would the facts have to be to make this opinion tenable? And

he makes it a habit—in himself and in the people with whom he

works—to think through and spell out what needs to be looked at,

studied, and tested. He insists that people who voice an opinion

also take responsibility for defining what factual findings can be

expected and should be looked for.

Perhaps the crucial question here is, What is the criterion of

relevance? This, more often than not, turns on the measurement

appropriate to the matter under discussion and to the decision to

be reached. Whenever one analyzes the way a truly effective, a

truly right, decision has been reached, one finds that a great

deal of work and thought went into finding the appropriate

measurement.

The effective decision-maker assumes that the traditional

measurement is not the right measurement. Otherwise, there would

generally be no need for a decision; a simple adjustment would do.

The traditional measurement reflects yesterday’s decision. That

there is need for a new one normally indicates that the

measurement is no longer relevant.

The best way to find the appropriate measurement is again to go

out and look for the “feedback” discussed earlier—only this is

“feedback” before the decision.

In most personnel matters, for instance, events are measured in

“averages,” such as the average number of lost-time accidents per

hundred employees, the average percentage of absenteeism in the

whole workforce, or the average illness rate per hundred. But the

executive who goes out and looks for himself will soon find that

he needs a different measurement. The averages serve the purposes

of the insurance company, but they are meaningless, indeed

misleading, for personnel management decisions.

The great majority of all accidents occur in one or two places

in the plant. The great bulk of absenteeism is in one department.

Even illness resulting in absence from work, we now know, is not

distributed as an average, but is concentrated in a very small

part of the workforce, e.g., young unmarried women. The personnel

actions to which dependence on the averages will lead—for

instance, the typical plantwide safety campaign—will not produce

the desired results, may indeed make things worse.

Finding the appropriate measurement is thus not a mathematical

exercise. It is a risk-taking judgment.

Whenever one has to judge, one must have alternatives among

which to choose. A judgment in which one can only say yes or no is

no judgment at all. Only if there are alternatives can one hope to

get insight into what is truly at stake.

Effective people therefore insist on alternatives of

measurement—so that they can choose the one appropriate one.

Develop Disagreement

Unless one has considered alternatives, one has a closed mind.

This, above all, explains why effective decision-makers

deliberately disregard the second major command of the textbooks

on decision-making and create dissension and disagreement, rather

than consensus.

Decisions of the kind the executive has to make are not made

well by acclamation. They are made well only if based on the clash

of conflicting views, the dialogue between different points of

view, the choice between different judgments. The first rule in

decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there

is disagreement.

Alfred P. Sloan is reported to have said at a meeting of one of

his top committees, “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete

agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded

assent. “Then,” continued Mr. Sloan, “I propose we postpone

further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give

ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some

understanding of what the decision is all about.”

Sloan was anything but an “intuitive” decision-maker. He always

emphasized the need to test opinions against facts and the need to

make absolutely sure that one did not start out with the

conclusion and then look for the facts that would support it. But

he knew that the right decision demands adequate disagreement.

There are three main reasons for the insistence on

disagreement.

It is, first, the only safeguard against the decision-maker’s

becoming the prisoner of the organization. Everybody always wants

something from the decision-maker. Everybody is a special pleader,

trying—often in perfectly good faith—to obtain the decision he

favors. This is true whether the decision-maker is the president

of the United States or the most junior engineer working on a

design modification.

The only way to break out of the prison of special pleading and

preconceived notions is to make sure of argued, documented,

thought-through disagreements.

Second, disagreement alone can provide alternatives to a

decision. And a decision without an alternative is a desperate

gambler’s throw, no matter how carefully thought through it might

be. There is always a high possibility that the decision will

prove wrong—either because it was wrong to begin with or because a

change in circumstances makes it wrong. If one has thought through

alternatives during the decision-making process, one has something

to fall back on, something that has already been thought through,

that has been studied, that is understood. Without such an

alternative, one is likely to flounder dismally when reality

proves a decision to be inoperative.

Above all, disagreement is needed to stimulate the imagination.

One does not, to be sure, need imagination to find the right

solution to a problem. But then this is of value only in

mathematics. In all matters of true uncertainty such as the

executive deals with—whether his sphere is political, economic,

social, or military—one needs “creative” solutions that create a

new situation. And this means that one needs imagination—a new and

different way of perceiving and understanding.

Imagination of the first order is, I admit, not in abundant

supply. But neither is it as scarce as is commonly believed.

Imagination needs to be challenged and stimulated, however, or

else it remains latent and unused. Disagreement, especially if

forced to be reasoned, thought through, documented, is the most

effective stimulus we know.

The effective decision-maker, therefore, organizes

disagreement. This protects him against being taken in by the

plausible but false or incomplete. It gives him the alternatives

so that he can choose and make a decision, but also so that he is

not lost in the fog when his decision proves deficient or wrong in

execution. And it forces the imagination—his own and that of his

associates. Disagreement converts the plausible into the right and

the right into the good decision.

The effective decision-maker does not start out with the

assumption that one proposed course of action is right and that

all others must be wrong. Nor does he start out with the

assumption, I am right and he is wrong. He starts out with the

commitment to find out why people disagree.

Effective people know, of course, that there are fools around

and that there are mischief-makers. But they do not assume that

the man who disagrees with what they themselves see as clear and

obvious is, therefore, either a fool or a knave. They know that

unless proven otherwise, the dissenter has to be assumed to be

reasonably intelligent and reasonably fair-minded. Therefore, it

has to be assumed that he has reached his so obviously wrong

conclusion because he sees a different reality and is concerned

with a different problem. The effective person, therefore, always

asks, What does this fellow have to see if his position were,

after all, tenable, rational, intelligent? The effective person is

concerned first with understanding. Only then does he even think

about who is right and who is wrong.

In a good law office, the beginner, fresh out of law school, is

first assigned to drafting the strongest possible case for the

other lawyer’s client. This is not only the intelligent thing to

do before one sits down to work out the case for one’s own client.

(One has to assume, after all, that the opposition’s lawyer knows

his business, too.) It is also the right training for a young

lawyer. It trains him not to start out with, “I know why my case

is right,” but with thinking through what it is that the other

side must know, see, or take as probable to believe that it has a

case at all. It tells him to see the two cases as alternatives.

And only then is he likely to understand what his own case is all

about. Only then can he make out a strong case in court that his

alternative is to be preferred over that of the other side.

Is a Decision Really Necessary?

There is one final question the effective decision-maker asks:

Is a decision really necessary? One alternative is always the

alternative of doing nothing.

Every decision is like surgery. It is an intervention into a

system and therefore carries with it the risk of shock. One does

not make unnecessary decisions any more than a good surgeon does

unnecessary surgery. Individual decision-makers, like individual

surgeons, differ in their styles. Some are more radical or more

conservative than others. But by and large, they agree on the

rules.

One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to

degenerate if nothing is done. This also applies with respect to

opportunity. If the opportunity is important and is likely to

vanish unless one acts with dispatch, one acts—and one makes a

radical change.

At the opposite end there are those conditions in respect to

which one can, without being unduly optimistic, expect that they

will take care of themselves even if nothing is done. If the

answer to the question, What will happen if we do nothing? is It

will take care of itself, one does not interfere. Nor does one

interfere if the condition, while annoying, is of no importance

and unlikely to make any difference anyhow.

It is a rare executive who understands this. The controller who

in a desperate financial crisis preaches cost reduction is seldom

capable of leaving alone minor blemishes, elimination of which

will achieve nothing. He may know, for instance, that the

significant costs that are out of control are in the sales

organization and in physical distribution. And he will work hard

and brilliantly at getting them under control. But then he will

discredit himself and the whole effort by making a big fuss about

the “unnecessary” employment of two or three old employees in an

otherwise efficient and well-run plant. And he will dismiss as

immoral the argument that eliminating these few semipensioners

will not make any difference anyhow. “Other people are making

sacrifices,” he will argue “Why should the plant people get away

with inefficiency?”

When it is all over, the organization will forget fast that he

saved the business. They will remember, though, his vendetta

against the two or three poor devils in the plant—and rightly so.

De minimis non curat praetor (The magistrate does not consider

trifles) said the Roman law almost two thousand years ago—but many

decision-makers still need to learn it.

The great majority of decisions will lie between these

extremes. The problem is not going to take care of itself, but it

is unlikely to turn into degenerative malignancy either. The

opportunity is only for improvement rather than for real change

and innovation, but it is still quite considerable. If we do not

act, in other words, we will in all probability survive. But if we

do act, we may be better off.

In this situation the effective decision-maker compares effort

and risk of action to risk of inaction. There is no formula for

the right decision here. But the guidelines are so clear that

decision in the concrete case is rarely difficult. They are:

Act if on balance the benefits greatly outweigh cost and risk.

Act or do not act, but do not “hedge” or compromise.

The surgeon who only takes out half the tonsils or half the

appendix risks as much infection or shock as if he did the whole

job. And he has not cured the condition, has indeed made it worse.

He either operates or he doesn’t. Similarly, the effective

decision-maker either acts or he doesn’t act. He does not take

half-action. This is the one thing that is always wrong, and the

one sure way not to satisfy the minimum specifications, the

minimum boundary conditions.

The decision is now ready to be made. The specifications have

been thought through, the alternatives explored, the risks and

gains weighed. Everything is known. Indeed, it is always

reasonably clear by now what course of action must be taken. At

this point the decision does indeed almost “make itself.”

And it is at this point that most decisions are lost. It

becomes suddenly quite obvious that the decision is not going to

be pleasant, is not going to be popular, is not going to be easy.

It becomes clear that a decision requires courage as much as it

requires judgment. There is no inherent reason why medicines

should taste horrible—but effective ones usually do. Similarly,

there is no inherent reason why decisions should be

distasteful—but most effective ones are.

One thing the effective knowledge worker will not do at this

point is give in to the cry, “Let’s make another study.” That is

the coward’s way—and all the coward achieves is to die a thousand

deaths where the brave man dies but one. When confronted with the

demand for “another study,” the effective executive asks, Is there

any reason to believe that additional study will produce anything

new? And is there reason to believe that the new is likely to be

relevant? And if the answer is no—as it usually is—the effective

decision-maker does not permit another study. He does not waste

the time of good people to cover up his own indecision.

But at the same time he will not rush into a decision unless he

is sure he understands it. Like any reasonably experienced adult,

he has learned to pay attention to what Socrates called his

“daemon”: the inner voice, somewhere in the bowels, that whispers,

“Take care.” Just because something is difficult, disagreeable, or

frightening is no reason for not doing it if it is right. But one

holds back—if only for a moment—if one finds oneself uneasy,

perturbed, bothered without quite knowing why. “I always stop when

things seem out of focus,” is the way one of the best

decision-makers of my acquaintance puts it.

Nine times out of ten the uneasiness turns out to be over some

silly detail. But the tenth time one suddenly realizes that one

has overlooked the most important fact in the problem, has made an

elementary blunder, or has misjudged altogether. The tenth time

one suddenly wakes up at night and realizes—as Sherlock Holmes did

in the famous story—that the “most significant thing is that the

hound of Baskerville didn’t bark.”

But the effective decision-maker does not wait long—a few days,

at the most a few weeks. If the “daemon” has not spoken by then,

he acts with speed and energy whether he likes to or not.

Knowledge workers are not paid for doing things they like to

do. They are paid for getting the right things done—most of all in

their specific task, the making of effective decisions.

As a result, decision-making can no longer be confined to the

very small group at the top. In one way or another almost every

knowledge worker in an organization will either have to become a

decision-maker himself or will at least have to be able to play an

active, an intelligent, and an autonomous part in the

decision-making process. What in the past had been a highly

specialized function, discharged by a small and usually clearly

defined organ—with the rest adapting within a mold of custom and

usage—is rapidly becoming a normal if not an everyday task of

every single unit in this new social institution, the large-scale

knowledge organization. The ability to make effective decisions

increasingly determines the ability of every knowledge worker, at

least of those in responsible positions, to be effective

altogether.

18.

FUNCTIONING

COMMUNICATIONS

We have more attempts at communications today, that is, more

attempts to talk to others, and a surfeit of communications media,

unimaginable to the men who, around the time of World War I,

started to work on the problems of communicating in organizations.

Communications in management has become a central concern to

students and practitioners in all institutions—business, the

military, public administration, hospital, university, and

research. In no other area have intelligent men and women worked

harder or with greater dedication than psychologists, human

relations experts, managers, and management students have worked

on improving communications in our major institutions.

Yet communications has proven as elusive as the unicorn. The

noise level has gone up so fast that no one can really listen

anymore to all that babble about communications. But there is

clearly less and less communicating.

We have learned, mostly through doing the wrong things, four

fundamentals of communications.

1. Communication is perception.

2. Communication is expectation.

3. Communication makes demands.

4. Communication and information are different and indeed

largely opposite—yet interdependent.

Communication Is Perception, Expectation, and Demand

An old riddle posed by the mystics of many religions—the Zen

Buddhists, the Sufis of Islam, and the Rabbis of the Talmud—asks,

Is there a sound in the forest if a tree crashes down and no one

is around to hear it? We now know that the right answer to this is

no. There are sound waves. But there is no sound unless someone

perceives it. Sound is created by perception. Sound is

communication.

This may seem trite; after all, the mystics of old already knew

this, for they too always answered that there is no sound unless

someone can hear it. Yet the implications of this rather trite

statement are great indeed.

First, it means that it is the recipient who communicates. The

so-called communicator, the person who emits the communication,

does not communicate. He utters. Unless there is someone who

hears, there is no communication. There is only noise.

In Plato’s Phaedo, which, among other things, is also the

earliest extant treatise on rhetoric, Socrates points out that one

has to talk to people in terms of their own experience, that is,

that one has to use carpenters’ metaphors when talking to

carpenters, and so on. One can communicate only in the recipient’s

language or in his terms. And the terms have to be

experience-based. It, therefore, does very little good to try to

explain terms to people. They will not be able to receive them if

they are not terms of their own experience. They simply exceed

their perception capacity.

In communicating, whatever the medium, the first question has

to be, Is this communication within the recipient’s range of

perception? Can he receive it?

One rarely realizes that there could be other dimensions, and

that something that is so obvious to us and so clearly validated

by our emotional experience has other dimensions, a “back” and

“sides,” which are entirely different and which, therefore, lead

to entirely different perceptions. The popular story about the

blind men and the elephant in which each one, encountering this

strange beast, feels one of the elephant’s parts, his leg, his

trunk, his hide, and reports an entirely different conclusion, and

holds to it tenaciously, is simply a metaphor of the human

condition. There is no possibility of communication until this is

understood and until he who has felt the hide of the elephant goes

over to him who has felt the leg and feels the leg himself. There

is no possibility of communication, in other words, unless we

first know what the recipient, the true communicator, can see and

why.

We perceive, as a rule, what we expect to perceive. We see

largely what we expect to see, and we hear largely what we expect

to hear. That the unexpected may be resented is not the important

thing—though most of the work on communications in business and

government thinks it is. What is truly important is that the

unexpected is usually not received at all. It is not seen or

heard, but ignored. Or it is misunderstood, that is, mis-seen or

mis-heard as the expected.

The human mind attempts to fit impressions and stimuli into a

frame of expectations. It resists vigorously any attempts to make

it “change its mind,” that is, to perceive what it does not expect

to perceive or not to perceive what it expects to perceive. It is,

of course, possible to alert the human mind to the fact that what

it perceives is contrary to its expectations. But this first

requires that we understand what it expects to perceive. It then

requires that there be an unmistakable signal—“this is different,”

that is, a shock that breaks continuity.

Before we can communicate, we must, therefore, know what the

recipient expects to see and hear. Only then can we know whether

communication can utilize his expectations—and what they are—or

whether there is need for the “shock of alienation,” for an

“awakening” that breaks through the recipient’s expectations and

forces him to realize that the unexpected is happening.

A phenomenon known to every newspaper editor is the amazingly

high readership and retention of the “fillers,” the little three-

or five-line bits of irrelevant incidental information that are

used to “balance” a page. Why should anybody want to read, let

alone remember, that it first became fashionable to wear

different-colored hose on each leg at the court of some

long-forgotten duke? Or, when and where baking powder was first

used? Yet there is no doubt that these little tidbits of

irrelevancy are read and, above all, that they are remembered far

better than almost anything else in the daily paper except the

screaming headlines of the catastrophes. The answer is that the

fillers make no demands. It is their total irrelevancy that

accounts for their being remembered.

Communication, in other words, always makes demands. It always

demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe

something. It always appeals to motivation. If, in other words,

communication fits in with the aspirations, the values, the

purposes of the recipient, it is powerful. If it goes against his

aspirations, his values, his motivations, it is likely not to be

received at all or, at best, to be resisted.

Of course, at its most powerful, communication brings about

“conversion,” that is, a change of personality, of values,

beliefs, aspirations. But this is the rare, existential event, and

one against which the basic psychological forces of every human

being are strongly organized. Even the Lord, the Bible reports,

first had to strike Saul blind before he could raise him up as

Paul. Communications aiming at conversion demand surrender.

Communication and Information

Where communication is perception, information is logic. As

such, information is purely formal and has no meaning. It is

impersonal rather than interpersonal. The more it can be freed of

the human component, that is, of such things as emotions and

values, expectations and perceptions, the more valid and reliable

does it become. Indeed, it becomes increasingly informative.

Information presupposes communication. Information is always

encoded. To be received, let alone to be used, the code must be

known and understood by the recipient. This requires prior

agreement, that is, some communication.

Communications, in other words, may not be dependent on

information. Indeed, the most perfect communications may be purely

“shared experiences,” without any logic whatever. Perception has

primacy rather than information.

Downward and Upward

What, then, can our knowledge and our experience teach us about

communications in organizations, about the reasons for our

failures, and about the prerequisites for success in the future?

For centuries we have attempted communication “downward.” This,

however, cannot work, no matter how hard and how intelligently we

try. It cannot work, first, because it focuses on what we want to

say. It assumes, in other words, that the utterer communicates.

This does not mean that managers should stop working on clarity

in what they say or write. Far from it. But it does mean that how

we say something comes only after we have learned what to say. And

this cannot be found out by “talking to,” no matter how well it is

being done.

But “listening” does not work either. The Human Relations

School of Elton Mayo, forty years ago, recognized the failure of

the traditional approach to communications. Its answer was to

enjoin listening. Instead of starting out with what “we,” that is,

the executive, want to “get across,” the executive should begin by

finding out what subordinates want to know, are interested in,

are, in other words, receptive to. To this day, the human

relations prescription, though rarely practiced, remains the

classic formula.

Of course, listening is a prerequisite to communication. But it

is not adequate, and it cannot, by itself, work. Listening assumes

that the superior will understand what he is being told. It

assumes, in other words, that the subordinates can communicate. It

is hard to see, however, why the subordinate should be able to do

what his superior cannot do. In fact, there is no reason for

assuming he can.

This is not to say that listening is wrong, any more than the

futility of downward communications furnishes any argument against

attempts to write well, to say things clearly and simply, and to

speak the language of those whom one addresses rather than one’s

own jargon. Indeed, the realization that communications have to be

upward—or rather that they have to start with the recipient rather

than the emitter, which underlies the concept of listening—is

absolutely sound and vital. But listening is only the starting

point.

More and better information does not solve the communications

problem, does not bridge the communications gap. On the contrary,

the more information, the greater is the need for functioning and

effective communication. The more information, in other words, the

greater is the communications gap likely to be.

Management by Objectives

Can we then say anything constructive about communication? Can

we do anything?

Management by objectives is a prerequisite for functioning

communication. It requires the subordinate to think through and

present to the superior his own conclusions as to what major

contribution to the organization—or to the unit within the

organization—he should be expected to perform and should be held

accountable for.

What the subordinate comes up with is rarely what the superior

expects. Indeed, the first aim of the exercise is precisely to

bring out the divergence in perception between superior and

subordinate. But the perception is focused, and focused on

something that is real to both parties. To realize that they see

the same reality differently is in itself already communication.

Management by objectives gives to the intended recipient of

communication—in this case the subordinate—access to experience

that enables him to understand. He is given access to the reality

of decision-making, the problems of priorities, the choice between

what one likes to do and what the situation demands, and above

all, the responsibility for a decision. He may not see the

situation the same way the superior does—in fact, he rarely will

or even should. But he may gain an understanding of the complexity

of the superior’s situation and of the fact that the complexity is

not of the superior’s making, but is inherent in the situation

itself.

The examples given in this chapter perhaps illustrate the main

conclusion to which our experience with communications—largely an

experience of failure—and all the work on learning, memory,

perception, and motivation point: communication requires shared

experience.

There can be no communication if it is conceived as going from

the “I” to the “Thou.” Communication works only from one member of

“us” to another. Communication in an organization—and this may be

the true lesson of our communication failure and the true measure

of our communication need—is not a means of organization. It is

the mode of organization.

19.

LEADERSHIP AS WORK

Leadership is all the rage just now. “We’d want you to run a

seminar for us on how one acquires charisma,” the human-resources

VP of a big bank said to me on the telephone—in dead earnest.

Books, articles, and conferences on leadership and on the

“qualities” of the leader abound. Every CEO, it seems, has to be

made to look like a dashing Confederate cavalry general or a

boardroom Elvis Presley.

Leadership does matter, of course. But, alas, it is something

different from what is now touted under this label. It has little

to do with “leadership qualities” and even less to do with

“charisma.” It is mundane, unromantic, and boring. Its essence is

performance.

In the first place, leadership is not by itself good or

desirable. Leadership is a means. Leadership to what end is thus

the crucial question.

History knows no more charismatic leaders than this century’s

triad of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—the misleaders who inflicted as

much evil and suffering on humanity as have ever been recorded.

But effective leadership doesn’t depend on charisma. Dwight

Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Harry Truman were singularly

effective leaders, yet none possessed any more charisma than a

dead mackerel. Nor did Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor who rebuilt

West Germany after World War II. No less charismatic personality

could be imagined than Abe Lincoln of Illinois, the raw-boned,

uncouth backwoodsman of 1860. And there was amazingly little

charisma to the bitter, defeated, almost broken Churchill of the

interwar years; what mattered was that he turned out in the end to

have been right.

Indeed, charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them

inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to

change. This is what happened to Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, and it

is a commonplace in the study of ancient history that only

Alexander the Great’s early death saved him from becoming an

ineffectual failure.

Indeed, charisma does not by itself guarantee effectiveness as

a leader. John F. Kennedy may have been the most charismatic

person ever to occupy the White House. Yet few presidents got as

little done.

Nor are there any such things as “leadership qualities” or a

“leadership personality.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston

Churchill, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery,

and Douglas MacArthur were all highly effective—and highly

visible—leaders during World War II. No two of them shared any

“personality traits” or any “qualities.”

Work, Responsibility, and Trust Earned

What then is leadership if it is not charisma and not a set of

personality traits? The first thing to say about it is that it is

work—something stressed again and again by the most charismatic

leaders: Julius Caesar, for instance, or General MacArthur and

Field Marshal Montgomery, or, to use an example from business,

Alfred Sloan, the man who built and led General Motors from 1920

to 1955.

The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through the

organization’s mission, defining it, and establishing it, clearly

and visibly. The leader sets the goals, sets the priorities, and

sets and maintains the standards. He makes compromises, of course;

indeed, effective leaders are painfully aware that they are not in

control of the universe. (Only misleaders—the Stalins, Hitlers,

Maos—suffer from that delusion.) But before accepting a

compromise, the effective leader has thought through what is right

and desirable. The leader’s first task is to be the trumpet that

sounds a clear sound.

What distinguishes the leader from the misleader are his goals.

Whether the compromise he makes with the constraints of

reality—which may involve political, economic, financial, or

interpersonal problems—are compatible with his mission and goals

or lead away from them determines whether he is an effective

leader. And whether he holds fast to a few basic standards

(exemplifying them in his own conduct), or whether “standards” for

him are what he can get away with, determines whether the leader

has followers or only hypocritical time-servers.

The second requirement is that the leader see leadership as

responsibility rather than as rank and privilege. Effective

leaders are rarely “permissive.” But when things go wrong—and they

always do—they do not blame others. If Winston Churchill is an

example of leadership through clearly defining mission and goals,

General George Marshall, America’s chief of staff in World War II,

is an example of leadership through responsibility. Harry Truman’s

folksy “The buck stops here” is still as good a definition as any.

But precisely because an effective leader knows that he, and no

one else, is ultimately responsible, he is not afraid of strength

in associates and subordinates. Misleaders are; they always go in

for purges. But an effective leader wants strong associates; he

encourages them, pushes them, indeed glories in them. Because he

holds himself ultimately responsible for the mistakes of his

associates and subordinates, he also sees the triumphs of his

associates and subordinates as his triumphs, rather than as

threats. A leader may be personally vain—as General MacArthur was

to an almost pathological degree. Or he may be personally

humble—both Lincoln and Truman were so almost to the point of

having inferiority complexes. But all three wanted able,

independent, self-assured people around them; they encouraged

their associates and subordinates, praising and promoting them. So

did a very different person: Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, when supreme

commander in Europe.

An effective leader knows, of course, that there is a risk:

able people tend to be ambitious. But he realizes that it is a

much smaller risk than to be served by mediocrity. He also knows

that the gravest indictment of a leader is for the organization to

collapse as soon as he leaves or dies, as happened in Russia the

moment Stalin died and as happens all too often in companies. An

effective leader knows that the ultimate task of leadership is to

create human energies and human vision.

The final requirement of effective leadership is to earn trust.

Otherwise, there won’t be any followers—and the only definition of

a leader is someone who has followers. To trust a leader, it is

not necessary to like him. Nor is it necessary to agree with him.

Trust is the conviction that the leader means what he says. It is

a belief in something very old-fashioned, called “integrity.” A

leader’s actions and a leader’s professed beliefs must be

congruent, or at least compatible. Effective leadership—and again

this is very old wisdom—is not based on being clever; it is based

primarily on being consistent.

After I had said these things on the telephone to the bank’s

human-resources VP, there was a long silence. Finally she said,

“But that’s no different at all from what we have known for years

are the requirements for being an effective manager.”

Precisely.

20.

PRINCIPLES OF INNOVATION

All experienced physicians have seen “miracle cures.” Patients

suffering from terminal illnesses recover suddenly—sometimes

spontaneously, sometimes by going to faith healers, by switching

to some absurd diet, or by sleeping during the day and being up

and about all night. Only a bigot denies that such cures happen

and dismisses them as “unscientific.” They are real enough. Yet no

physician is going to put miracle cures into a textbook or into a

course to be taught to medical students. They cannot be

replicated, cannot be taught, cannot be learned. They are also

extremely rare; the overwhelming majority of terminal cases do

die, after all.

Innovation as a Practice

Similarly, there are innovations that do not proceed from the

sources of innovative opportunity, innovations that are not

developed in any organized, purposeful, systematic manner. There

are innovators who are “kissed by the Muses,” and whose

innovations are the result of a “flash of genius” rather than of

hard, organized, purposeful work. But such innovations cannot be

replicated. They cannot be taught and they cannot be learned.

There is no known way to teach someone how to be a genius.

But also, contrary to popular belief in the romance of

invention and innovation, “flashes of genius” are uncommonly rare.

What is worse, I know of not one such “flash of genius” that

turned into an innovation. They all remained brilliant ideas.

The purposeful innovation resulting from analysis, system, and

hard work is all that can be discussed and presented as the

practice of innovation. But this is all that need be presented

since it surely covers at least 90 percent of all effective

innovations. And the extraordinary performer in innovation, as in

every other area, will be effective only if grounded in the

discipline and master of it.

What, then, are the principles of innovation, representing the

hard core of the discipline? There are a number of “dos”—things

that have to be done. There are also a few “don’ts”—things that

had better not be done. And then there are what I would call

“conditions.”

The Dos

1. Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis

of the opportunities. It begins with thinking through what I have

called the seven sources of innovative opportunity. In different

areas, different sources will have different importance at

different times.

The organization’s own unexpected successes and unexpected

failures, but also the unexpected successes and unexpected

failures of the organization’s competitors

Incongruities, especially incongruities in the process, whether

of production or distribution, or incongruities in customer

behavior

Process needs

Changes in industry and market structures

Changes in demographics

Changes in meaning and perception

New knowledge

All the sources of innovative opportunity should be

systematically analyzed and systematically studied. It is not

enough to be alerted to them. The search has to be organized, and

must be done on a regular, systematic basis.

2. Innovation is both conceptual and perceptual. The second

imperative of innovation is therefore to go out to look, to ask,

to listen. This cannot be stressed too often. Successful

innovators use both the right side and the left side of their

brains. They look at figures, and they look at people. They work

out analytically what the innovation has to be to satisfy an

opportunity. And then they go out and look at the customers, the

users, to see what are their expectations, their values, and their

needs.

Receptivity can be perceived, as can values. One can perceive

that this or that approach will not fit in with the expectations

or the habits of the people who have to use it. And then one can

ask, What does this innovation have to reflect so that the people

who have to use it will want to use it, and see in it their

opportunity? Otherwise, one runs the risk of having the right

innovation in the wrong form.

3. An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has

to be focused. It should do only one thing; otherwise, it

confuses. If it is not simple, it won’t work. Everything new runs

into trouble; if complicated, it cannot be repaired or fixed. All

effective innovations are breathtakingly simple. Indeed, the

greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say,

“This is obvious. Why didn’t I think of it?”

Even the innovation that creates new uses and new markets

should be directed toward a specific, clear, designed application.

It should be focused on a specific need that it satisfies, on a

specific end result that it produces.

4. Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose.

They try to do one specific thing. It may be to enable a moving

vehicle to draw electric power while it runs along rails—the

innovation that made possible the electric streetcar. Or it may be

as elementary as putting the same number of matches into a

matchbox (it used to be fifty), which made possible the automatic

filling of matchboxes and gave the Swedish originators of the idea

a world monopoly on matches for almost half a century. Grandiose

ideas, plans that aim at “revolutionizing an industry,” are

unlikely to work.

Innovations had better be capable of being started small,

requiring at first little money, few people, and only a small and

limited market. Otherwise, there is not enough time to make the

adjustments and changes that are almost always needed for an

innovation to succeed. Initially innovations rarely are more than

“almost right.” The necessary changes can be made only if the

scale is small and the requirements for people and money fairly

modest.

5. But—and this is the final “do”—a successful innovation aims

at leadership. It does not aim necessarily at becoming eventually

a “big business”; in fact, no one can foretell whether a given

innovation will end up as a big business or a modest achievement.

But if an innovation does not aim at leadership from the

beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough, and therefore

unlikely to be capable of establishing itself. Strategies vary

greatly, from those that aim at dominance in an industry or a

market to those that aim at finding and occupying a small

“ecological niche” in a process or market. But all entrepreneurial

strategies, that is, all strategies aimed at exploiting an

innovation, must achieve leadership within a given environment.

Otherwise, they will simply create an opportunity for the

competition.

The Don’ts

And now the few important “don’ts.”

1. The first is simply not to try to be clever. Innovations

have to be handled by ordinary human beings, and if they are to

attain any size and importance at all, by morons or near-morons.

Incompetence, after all, is the only thing in abundant and

never-failing supply. Anything too clever, whether in design or

execution, is almost bound to fail.

2. Don’t diversify; don’t splinter; don’t try to do too many

things at once. This is, of course, the corollary to the “do”: be

focused! Innovations that stray from a core are likely to become

diffuse. They remain ideas and do not become innovations. The core

does not have to be technology or knowledge. In fact, market

knowledge supplies a better core of unity in any enterprise,

whether business or public-service institution, than knowledge or

technology does. But there has to be a core of unity to innovative

efforts or they are likely to fly apart. An innovation needs the

concentrated energy of a unified effort behind it. It also

requires that the people who put it into effect understand each

other, and this, too, requires a unity, a common core. This, too,

is imperiled by diversity and splintering.

3. Finally, don’t try to innovate for the future. Innovate for

the present! An innovation may have long-range impact; it may not

reach its full maturity until twenty years later.

But it is not good enough to be able to say, “In twenty-five

years there will be so many very old people that they will need

this.” One has to be able to say, “There are enough old people

around today for this to make a difference to them. Of course,

time is with us—in twenty-five years there will be many more.” But

unless there is an immediate application in the present, an

innovation is like the drawings in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook—a

“brilliant idea.” Very few of us have Leonardo’s genius and can

expect that our notebooks alone will assure immortality.

The first innovator who fully understood this third caveat was

probably Thomas Edison. Every other electrical inventor of the

time began to work around 1860 or 1865 on what eventually became

the light bulb. Edison waited for ten years until the knowledge

became available; up to that point, work on the light bulb was “of

the future.” But when the knowledge became available—when, in

other words, a light bulb could become “the present”—Edison

organized his tremendous energies and an extraordinarily capable

staff and concentrated for a couple of years on that one

innovative opportunity.

Innovative opportunities sometimes have long lead times. In

pharmaceutical research, ten years of research and development

work are by no means uncommon or particularly long. And yet no

pharmaceutical company would dream of starting a research project

for something that does not, if successful, have immediate

application as a drug for health-care needs that already exist.

Three Conditions for a Successful Innovation

Finally, there are three conditions that must be met for an

innovation to be successful. All three are obvious but often are

disregarded.

1. Innovation is work. It requires knowledge. It often requires

great ingenuity. There are clearly people who are more talented

innovators than the rest of us. Also, innovators rarely work in

more than one area. For all his tremendous innovative capacity,

Edison worked only in the electrical field. And an innovator in

financial areas, Citibank in New York, for instance, is unlikely

to embark on innovations in retailing or health care. In

innovation as in any other work there is talent, there is

ingenuity, and there is predisposition. But when all is said and

done, innovation becomes hard, focused, purposeful work making

very great demands on diligence, on persistence, and on

commitment. If these are lacking, no amount of talent, ingenuity,

or knowledge will avail.

2. To succeed, innovators must build on their strengths.

Successful innovators look at opportunities over a wide range. But

then they ask, Which of these opportunities fits me, fits this

company, puts to work what we (or I) are good at and have shown

capacity for in performance? In this respect, of course,

innovation is no different from other work. But it may be more

important in innovation to build on one’s strengths because of the

risks of innovation and the resulting premium on knowledge and

performance capacity. And in innovation, as in any other venture,

there must also be a temperamental “fit.” Businesses do not do

well in something they do not really respect. No pharmaceutical

company—run as it has to be by scientifically minded people who

see themselves as “serious”—has done well in anything so

“frivolous” as lipsticks or perfumes. Innovators similarly need to

be temperamentally attuned to the innovative opportunity. It must

be important to them and make sense to them. Otherwise they will

not be willing to put in the persistent, hard, frustrating work

that successful innovation always requires.

3. And finally, innovation is an effect in economy and society,

a change in the behavior of customers, of teachers, of farmers, of

eye surgeons—of people in general. Or it is a change in a

process—that is, in how people work and produce something.

Innovation therefore always has to be close to the market, focused

on the market, indeed market-driven.

The Conservative Innovator

A year or two ago I attended a university symposium on

entrepreneurship at which a number of psychologists spoke.

Although their papers disagreed on everything else, they all

talked of an “entrepreneurial personality,” which was

characterized by a “propensity for risk-taking.”

A well-known and successful innovator and entrepreneur who had

built a process-based innovation into a substantial worldwide

business in the space of twenty-five years was then asked to

comment. He said: “I find myself baffled by your papers. I think I

know as many successful innovators and entrepreneurs as anyone,

beginning with myself. I have never come across an

‘entrepreneurial personality.’ The successful ones I know all

have, however, one thing—and only one thing—in common: they are

not ‘risk-takers.’ They try to define the risks they have to take

and to minimize them as much as possible. Otherwise none of us

could have succeeded. As for myself, if I had wanted to be a

risk-taker, I would have gone into real estate or commodity

trading, or I would have become the professional painter my mother

wanted me to be.”

This jibes with my own experience. I, too, know a good many

successful innovators and entrepreneurs. Not one of them has a

“propensity for risk-taking.”

The popular picture of innovators—half pop-psychology, half

Hollywood—makes them look like a cross between Superman and the

Knights of the Round Table. Alas, most of them in real life are

unromantic figures, and much more likely to spend hours on a

cash-flow projection than to dash off looking for “risks.”

Of course innovation is risky. But so is stepping into the car

to drive to the supermarket for a loaf of bread. All economic

activity is by definition “high-risk.” And defending

yesterday—that is, not innovating—is far more risky than making

tomorrow. The innovators I know are successful to the extent to

which they define risks and confine them. They are successful to

the extent to which they systematically analyze the sources of

innovative opportunity, then pinpoint the opportunity and exploit

it—whether an opportunity of small and clearly definable risk,

such as exploiting the unexpected or a process need, or an

opportunity of much greater but still definable risk, as in

knowledge-based innovation.

Successful innovators are conservative. They have to be. They

are not “risk-focused”; they are “opportunity-focused.”

21.

THE SECOND HALF

OF YOUR LIFE

For the first time in human history, individuals can expect to

outlive organizations. This creates a totally new challenge: What

to do with the second half of one’s life?

One can no longer expect that the organization for which one

works at age thirty will still be around when one reaches age

sixty. But also, forty or fifty years in the same kind of work is

much too long for most people. They deteriorate, get bored, lose

all joy in their work, “retire on the job,” and become a burden to

themselves and to everyone around them.

This is not necessarily true of the very top achievers such as

very great artists. Claude Monet (1840–1926), the greatest

Impressionist painter, was still painting masterpieces in his

eighties, and working twelve hours a day, even though he had lost

almost all his eyesight. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), perhaps the

greatest Postimpressionist painter, similarly painted till he died

in his nineties—and in his seventies invented a new style. The

greatest musical instrumentalist of this century, the Spanish

cellist Pablo Casals (1876–1973), planned to perform a new piece

of music and practiced it on the very day on which he died at age

ninety-seven. But these are the rarest of exceptions even among

very great achievers. Neither Max Planck (1858–1947) nor Albert

Einstein (1879–1955), the two giants of modern physics, did

important scientific work after their forties. Planck had two more

careers. After 1918—aged sixty—he reorganized German science.

After being forced into retirement by the Nazis in 1933, he, in

1945, almost ninety, started once more to rebuild German science

after Hitler’s fall. But Einstein retired in his forties to become

a “famous man.”

There is a great deal of talk today about the “midlife crisis”

of the executive. It is mostly boredom. At age forty-five most

executives have reached the peak of their business career and know

it. After twenty years of doing very much the same kind of work,

they are good at their jobs. But few are learning anything

anymore, few are contributing anything anymore, and few expect the

job again to become a challenge and a satisfaction.

Manual workers who have been working for forty years—in the

steel mill for instance, or in the cab of a locomotive—are

physically and mentally tired long before they reach the end of

their normal life expectancy, that is, well before they reach even

traditional retirement age. They are “finished.” If they

survive—and their life expectancy too has gone up to an average of

seventy-five years or so—they are quite happy spending ten or

fifteen years doing nothing, playing golf, going fishing, engaging

in some minor hobby, and so on. But knowledge workers are not

“finished.” They are perfectly capable of functioning despite all

kinds of minor complaints. And yet the original work that was so

challenging when the knowledge worker was thirty has become a

deadly bore when the knowledge worker is fifty—and still he or she

is likely to face another fifteen if not another twenty years of

work.

To manage oneself, therefore, will increasingly require

preparing oneself for the second half of one’s life.

Three Answers for the Second Half of Life

There are three answers.

The first is actually to start a second and different career

(as Max Planck did). Often this means only moving from one kind of

organization to another.

Typical are the middle-level American business executives who

in substantial numbers move to a hospital, a university, or some

other nonprofit organization, around age forty-five or

forty-eight, when the children are grown and the retirement

pension is vested. In many cases they stay in the same kind of

work. The divisional controller in the big corporation becomes,

for instance, controller in a medium-sized hospital. But there are

also a growing number of people who actually move into a different

line of work.

In the United States there are a fairly substantial number of

middle-aged women who have worked for twenty years, in business or

in local government, have risen to a junior management position,

and now, at age forty-five and with the children grown, enter law

school. Three or four years later they then establish themselves

as small-time lawyers in their local communities.

We will see many more such second-career people who have

achieved fair success in their first job. Those people have

substantial skills, for example, the divisional controller who

moves into the local community hospital. They know how to work.

They need a community—and the house is empty with the children

gone. They need the income, too. But above all, they need the

challenge.

The second answer to the question of what to do with the second

half of one’s life is to develop a parallel career.

A large and rapidly growing number of people—especially people

who are very successful in their first careers—stay in the work

they have been doing for twenty or twenty-five years. Many keep on

working forty or fifty hours a week in their main and paid job.

Some move from being busy full-time to being part-time employees

or become consultants. But then they create for themselves a

parallel job—usually in a nonprofit organization—and one that

often takes another ten hours of work a week.

And then, finally—the third answer—there are the “social

entrepreneurs.” These are usually people who have been very

successful in their first profession, as businesspeople, as

physicians, as consultants, as university professors. They love

their work, but it no longer challenges them. In many cases they

keep on doing what they have been doing all along, though they

spend less and less of their time on it. But they start another,

and usually a nonprofit, activity.

People who manage the “second half” may always be a minority.

The majority may keep doing what they are doing now, that is,

retire on the job, continue being bored, keeping on with their

routine, and counting the years until retirement. But it is this

minority, the people who see the long working-life expectancy as

an opportunity both for themselves and for society, who will

increasingly become the leaders and the models. They,

increasingly, will be the “success stories.”

There is one requirement for managing the second half of one’s

life: to begin creating it long before one enters it.

When it first became clear thirty years ago that working-life

expectancies were lengthening very fast, many observers (including

myself) believed that retired people would increasingly become

volunteers for American nonprofit institutions. This has not

happened. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is forty

or so, one will not volunteer when past sixty.

Similarly, all the social entrepreneurs I know began to work in

their chosen second enterprise long before they reached their peak

in their original business. One highly successful lawyer, for

example, began to do volunteer legal work for the schools in his

state when he was around thirty-five. He got himself elected to a

school board at age forty. When he reached fifty, and had amassed

a substantial fortune, he then started his own enterprise to build

and run model schools. He is, however, still working nearly

full-time as the lead counsel in the very big company that, as a

very young lawyer, he had helped found.

There is another reason that managing yourself will

increasingly mean that the knowledge worker develops a second

major interest, and develops it early.

No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a

serious setback in one’s life or in one’s work. There is the

competent engineer who at age forty-two is being passed over for

promotion in the company. There is the competent college professor

who at age forty-two realizes that she will stay forever in the

small college in which she got her first appointment and will

never get the professorship at the big university—even though she

may be fully qualified for it. There are tragedies in one’s

personal family life—the breakup of one’s marriage, the loss of a

child.

And then a second major interest—and not just another hobby—may

make all the difference. The competent engineer passed over for

promotion now knows that he has not been very successful in his

job. But in his outside activity—for example, as treasurer in his

local church—he has achieved success and continues to have

success. One’s own family may break up, but in that outside

activity there is still a community.

This will be increasingly important in a society in which

success has become important.

Historically, there was no such thing. The overwhelming

majority of people did not expect anything but to stay in their

“proper station,” as an old English prayer has it. The only

mobility there was downward mobility. Success was practically

unknown.

In a knowledge society we expect everyone to be a “success.”

But this is clearly an impossibility. For a great many people

there is, at best, absence of failure. For where there is success,

there has to be failure. And then it is vitally important for the

individual—but equally for the individual’s family—that there be

an area in which the individual contributes, makes a difference,

and is somebody. That means having a second area, whether a second

career, a parallel career, a social venture, a serious outside

interest, anything offering an opportunity for being a leader, for

being respected, for being a success.

Revolution for the Individuals

The changes and challenges of managing oneself may seem

obvious, if not elementary. And the answers may seem to be

self-evident to the point of appearing naive.

Managing oneself, however, is a revolution in human affairs. It

requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and

especially from the knowledge worker. For in effect, it demands

that each knowledge worker think and behave as a chief executive

officer. It also requires an almost 180-degree change in the

knowledge worker’s thoughts and actions from what most of us—even

of the younger generation—still take for granted as the way to

think and the way to act. Knowledge workers, after all, first came

into being in any substantial numbers a generation ago. (I coined

the term “knowledge worker” years ago.)

But also the shift from manual workers who do as they are being

told—either by the task or by the boss—to knowledge workers who

have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure.

For every existing society, even the most “individualist” one,

takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously:

organizations outlive workers, and most people stay put. Managing

oneself is based two very opposite realities: workers are likely

to outlive organizations, and the knowledge worker has mobility.

In the United States, mobility is accepted. But even in the

United States, workers outliving organizations—and with it the

need to be prepared for a different second half of one’s life—is a

revolution for which practically no one is prepared. Nor is any

existing institution, for example, the present retirement system.

In the rest of the developed world, however, immobility is

expected and accepted. It is “stability.”

In Germany, for instance, mobility—until very recently—came to

an end with the individual’s reaching age ten or, at the latest,

age sixteen. If a child did not enter Gymnasium at age ten, he or

she had lost any chance ever to go to the university. And the

apprenticeship that the great majority who did not go to the

Gymnasium entered at age fifteen or sixteen as a mechanic, a bank

clerk, a cook—irrevocably and irreversibly—decided what work the

person was going to do the rest of his or her life. Moving from

the occupation of one’s apprenticeship into another occupation was

simply not done even when not actually forbidden.

Transformation of Every Society

The developed society that faces the greatest challenge and

will have to make the most difficult changes is the society that

has been most successful in the last fifty years: Japan. Japan’s

success—and there is no precedent for it in history—very largely

rested on organized immobility—the immobility of “lifetime

employment.” In lifetime employment it is the organization that

manages the individual. And it does so, of course, on the

assumption that the individual has no choice. The individual is

being managed.

I very much hope that Japan will find a solution that preserves

the social stability, the community—and the social harmony—that

lifetime employment provided, and yet creates the mobility that

knowledge work and knowledge workers must have. Far more is at

stake than Japan’s own society and civic harmony. A Japanese

solution would provide a model—for in every country a functioning

society does require cohesion. Still, a successful Japan will be a

very different Japan.

But so will be every other developed country. The emergence of

the knowledge worker who both can and must manage himself or

herself is transforming every society.

22.

THE EDUCATED PERSON

Knowledge is not impersonal, like money. Knowledge does not

reside in a book, a databank, a software program; they contain

only information. Knowledge is always embodied in a person;

carried by a person; created, augmented, or improved by a person;

applied by a person; taught and passed on by a person; used or

misused by a person. The shift to the knowledge society therefore

puts the person in the center. In so doing, it raises new

challenges, new issues, new and quite unprecedented questions

about the knowledge society’s representative, the educated person.

In all earlier societies, the educated person was an ornament.

He or she embodied Kultur—the German term that with its mixture of

awe and derision is untranslatable into English (even “highbrow”

does not come close). But in the knowledge society, the educated

person is society’s emblem; society’s symbol; society’s

standard-bearer. The educated person is the social “archetype”—to

use the sociologist’s term. He or she defines society’s

performance capacity. But he or she also embodies society’s

values, beliefs, commitments. If the feudal knight was the

clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the

“bourgeois” in the Age of Capitalism, the educated person will

represent society in the postcapitalist world in which knowledge

has become the central resource.

This must change the very meaning of “educated person.” It must

change the very meaning of what it means to be educated. It will

thus predictably make the definition of an “educated person” a

crucial issue. With knowledge becoming the key resource, the

educated person faces new demands, new challenges, new

responsibilities. The educated person now matters.

For the last ten or fifteen years a vigorous—often

shrill—debate has been raging in American academia over the

educated person. Should there be one? Could there be one? And what

should be considered “education” anyway?

A motley crew of post-Marxists, radical feminists, and other

“antis” argues that there can be no such thing as an educated

person—the position of those new nihilists, the

“deconstructionists.” Others in this group assert that there can

be only educated persons with each sex, each ethnic group, each

race, each “minority” requiring its own separate culture and a

separate—indeed, an isolationist—educated person. Since these

people are mainly concerned with the “humanities,” there are few

echoes as yet of Hitler’s “Aryan physics,” Stalin’s “Marxist

genetics,” or Mao’s “Communist psychology.” But the arguments of

these antitraditionalists recall those of the totalitarians. And

their target is the same: the universalism that is at the very

core of the concept of an educated person, whatever it may be

called (“educated person” in the West, or “bunjin” in China and

Japan).

The opposing camp—we might call them the “humanists”—also

scorns the present system. But it does so because it fails to

produce a universally educated person. The humanist critics demand

a return to the nineteenth century, to the “liberal arts,” the

“classics,” the German Gebildete Mensch. They do not, so far,

repeat the assertion made by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler

fifty years ago at the University of Chicago that knowledge in its

entirety consists of a hundred “great books.” But they are in

direct line of descent from the Hutchins-Adler “return to

premodernity.”

Both sides, alas, are wrong.

At the Core of the Knowledge Society

The knowledge society must have at its core the concept of the

educated person. It will have to be a universal concept, precisely

because the knowledge society is a society of knowledges and

because it is global—in its money, its economics, its careers, its

technology, its central issues, and above all, in its information.

Postcapitalist society requires a unifying force. It requires a

leadership group, which can focus local, particular, separate

traditions onto a common and shared commitment to values, a common

concept of excellence, and on mutual respect.

The postcapitalist society—the knowledge society—thus needs

exactly the opposite of what deconstructionists, radical

feminists, or anti-Westerners propose. It needs the very thing

they totally reject: a universally educated person.

Yet the knowledge society needs a kind of educated person

different from the ideal for which the humanists are fighting.

They rightly stress the folly of their opponents’ demand to

repudiate the Great Tradition and the wisdom, beauty, and

knowledge that are the heritage of mankind. But a bridge to the

past is not enough—and that is all the humanists offer. The

educated person needs to be able to bring his or her knowledge to

bear on the present, not to mention to have a role in molding the

future. There is no provision for such ability in the proposals of

the humanists, indeed, no concern for it. But without it, the

Great Tradition remains dusty antiquarianism.

In his 1943 novel Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game),

Hermann Hesse anticipated the sort of world the humanists want—and

its failure. The book depicts a brotherhood of intellectuals,

artists, and humanists who live a life of splendid isolation,

dedicated to the Great Tradition, its wisdom and its beauty. But

the hero, the most accomplished Master of the Brotherhood, decides

in the end to return to the polluted, vulgar, turbulent,

strife-torn, money-grubbing reality—for his values are only fool’s

gold unless they have relevance to the world.

What Hesse foresaw more than fifty years ago is now in fact

happening. “Liberal education” and “Allgemeine Bildung” (“general

education”) are in crisis today because they have become a

Glasperlenspiel, which the brightest desert for crass, vulgar,

money-grubbing reality. The ablest students appreciate the liberal

arts. They enjoy them fully as much as did their

great-grandparents, who graduated before World War I. For that

earlier generation, liberal arts and Allgemeine Bildung remained

meaningful throughout their lives, and defined their identity.

They still remained meaningful for many members of my generation,

which graduated before World War II—even though we immediately

forgot our Latin and Greek. But all over the world today’s

students, a few years after they have graduated, complain that

“what I have learned so eagerly has no meaning; it has no

relevance to anything I am interested in or want to become.” They

still want a liberal arts curriculum for their own

children—Princeton or Carleton; Oxbridge; Tokyo University; the

lycée; the Gymnasium—though mainly for social status and access to

good jobs. But in their own lives they repudiate such values. They

repudiate the educated person of the humanists. Their liberal

education, in other words, does not enable them to understand

reality, let alone to master it.

Both sides in the present debate are largely irrelevant.

Postcapitalist society needs the educated person even more than

any earlier society did, and access to the great heritage of the

past will have to be an essential element. But this heritage will

embrace a good deal more than the civilization that is still

mainly Western, the Judeo-Christian tradition, for which the

humanists are fighting. The educated person we need will have to

be able to appreciate other cultures and traditions: for example,

the great heritage of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean paintings and

ceramics; the philosophers and religions of the Orient; and Islam,

both as a religion and as a culture. The educated person also will

have to be far less exclusively “bookish” than the product of the

liberal education of the humanists. He or she will need trained

perception fully as much as analysis.

The Western tradition will, however, still have to be at the

core, if only to enable the educated person to come to grips with

the present, let alone the future. The future may be

“post-Western”; it may be “anti-Western.” It cannot be

“non-Western.” Its material civilization and its knowledges all

rest on Western foundations: Western science; tools and

technology; production; economics; Western-style finance and

banking. None of these can work unless grounded in an

understanding and acceptance of Western ideas and of the entire

Western tradition.

The most profoundly “anti-Western” movement today is not

fundamentalist Islam. It is the revolt of the “Shining Path” in

Peru—the desperate attempt of the descendants of the Incas to undo

the Spanish Conquest, to go back to the Indians’ ancient tongues

of Quechua and Aymara, and to drive the hated Europeans and their

culture back into the ocean. But this anti-Western rebellion

finances itself by growing coca for the drug addicts of New York

and Los Angeles. Its favorite weapon is not the Incas’ slingshot;

it is the car bomb.

Tomorrow’s educated person will have to be prepared for life in

a global world. It will be a “Westernized” world, but also

increasingly a tribalized world. He or she must become a “citizen

of the world”—in vision, horizon, information. But he or she will

also have to draw nourishment from their local roots and, in turn,

enrich and nourish their own local culture.

Knowledge Society and Society of Organizations

Postcapitalist society is both a knowledge society and a

society of organizations, each dependent on the other and yet each

very different in its concepts, views, and values. Most, if not

all, educated persons will practice their knowledge as members of

an organization. The educated person will therefore have to be

prepared to live and work simultaneously in two cultures—that of

the “intellectual,” who focuses on words and ideas, and that of

the “manager,” who focuses on people and work.

Intellectuals see the organization as a tool; it enables them

to practice their techné, their specialized knowledge. Managers

see knowledge as a means to the end of organizational

performances. Both are right. They are opposites; but they relate

to each other as poles rather than as contradictions. They surely

need each other: the research scientist needs the research manager

just as much as the research manager needs the research scientist.

If one overbalances the other, there is only nonperformance and

all-around frustration. The intellectual’s world, unless

counterbalanced by the manager, becomes one in which everybody

“does his own thing” but nobody achieves anything. The manager’s

world, unless counterbalanced by the intellectual, becomes the

stultifying bureaucracy of the “organization man.” But if the two

balance each other, there can be creativity and order, fulfillment

and mission.

A good many people in the postcapitalist society will actually

live and work in these two cultures at the same time. And many

more should be exposed to working experience in both cultures, by

rotation early in their careers—from a specialist’s job to a

managerial one, for instance, rotating the young computer

technician into project manager and team leader, or by asking the

young college professor to work part-time for two years in

university administration. And again, working as “unpaid staff” in

an agency of the social sector will give the individual the

perspective and the balance to respect both worlds, that of the

intellectual and that of the manager.

All educated persons in the postcapitalist society will have to

be prepared to understand both cultures.

Technés and the Educated Person

For the educated person in the nineteenth century, technés were

not knowledge. They were already taught in the university and had

become “disciplines.” Their practitioners were “professionals,”

rather than “tradesmen” or “artisans.” But they were not part of

the liberal arts or the Allgemeine Bildung, and thus not part of

knowledge.

University degrees in technés go back a long way: in Europe,

with both the law degree and the medical degree, as far as the

thirteenth century. And on the Continent and in America—though not

in England—the new engineering degree (first awarded in Napoleon’s

France a year or two before 1800) soon became socially accepted.

Most people who were considered “educated” made their living

practicing a techné—whether as lawyers, physicians, engineers,

geologists, or, increasingly, in business (only in England was

there esteem for the “gentleman” without occupation). But their

job or their profession was seen as a “living,” not a “life.”

Outside their offices, the techné practitioners did not talk

about their work or even about their disciplines. That was “shop

talk”; the Germans sneered at it as Fachsimpeln. It was even more

derided in France: anyone who indulged in shop talk there was

considered a boor and a bore, and promptly taken off the

invitation lists of polite society.

But now that the technés have become knowledges in the plural,

they have to be integrated into knowledge. The technés have to

become part of what it means to be an educated person. The fact

that the liberal arts curriculum they enjoyed so much in their

college years refuses to attempt this is the reason why today’s

students repudiate it a few years later. They feel let down, even

betrayed. They have good reason to feel that way. Liberal arts and

Allgemeine Bildung that do not integrate the knowledges into a

“universe of knowledge” are neither “liberal” nor “Bildung.” They

fall down on their first task: to create mutual understanding,

that “universe of discourse” without which there can be no

civilization. Instead of uniting, such disciplines only fragment.

We neither need nor will get “polymaths,” who are at home in

many knowledges; in fact, we will probably become even more

specialized. But what we do need—and what will define the educated

person in the knowledge society—is the ability to understand the

various knowledges. What is each one about? What is it trying to

do? What are its central concerns and theories? What major new

insights has it produced? What are its important areas of

ignorance, its problems, its challenges?

To Make Knowledges the Path to Knowledge

Without such understanding, the knowledges themselves will

become sterile, will indeed cease to be “knowledges.” They will

become intellectually arrogant and unproductive. For the major new

insights in every one of the specialized knowledges arise out of

another, separate specialty, out of another one of the knowledges.

Both economics and meteorology are being transformed at present

by the new mathematics of chaos theory. Geology is being

profoundly changed by the physics of matter, archaeology by the

genetics of DNA typing; history by psychological, statistical, and

technological analyses and techniques. An American, James M.

Buchanan (b. 1919), received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics for

applying recent economic theory to the political process and

thereby standing on their heads the assumptions and theories on

which political scientists had based their work for over a

century.

The specialists have to take responsibility for making both

themselves and their specialty understood. The media, whether

magazines, movies, or television, have a crucial role to play. But

they cannot do the job by themselves. Nor can any other kind of

popularization. Specialties must be understood for what they are:

serious, rigorous, demanding disciplines. This requires that the

leaders in each of the knowledges, beginning with the leading

scholars in each field, must take on the hard work of defining

what it is they do.

There is no “queen of the knowledges” in the knowledge society.

All knowledges are equally valuable; all knowledges, in the words

of the great medieval philosopher Saint Bonaventura, lead equally

to the truth. But to make them paths to truth, paths to knowledge,

has to be the responsibility of the men and women who own these

knowledges. Collectively, they hold knowledge in trust.

Capitalism had been dominant for over a century when Karl Marx

in the first volume of Das Kapital identified it (in 1867) as a

distinct social order. The term “capitalism” was not coined until

thirty years later, well after Marx’s death. It would therefore

not only be presumptuous in the extreme to attempt to write The

Knowledge today; it would be ludicrously premature. All that can

be attempted is to describe society and polity as we begin the

transition from the age of capitalism (also, of course, the age of

socialism).

But we can hope that a hundred years hence a book of this kind,

if not one entitled The Knowledge, can be written. That would mean

that we have successfully weathered the transition upon which we

have only just embarked. It would be as foolish to predict the

knowledge society as it would have been foolish to predict in

1776—the year of the American Revolution, of Adam Smith’s Wealth

of Nations, and of James Watt’s steam engine—the society of which

Marx wrote a hundred years later. And it was as foolish of Marx to

try to predict in mid-Victorian capitalism—and with “scientific

infallibility”—the society in which we live now.

But one thing we can predict: the greatest change will be the

change in knowledge—in its form and content; in its meaning; in

its responsibility; and in what it means to be an educated person.

III.

SOCIETY

23.

A CENTURY OF SOCIAL

TRANSFORMATION—EMERGENCE

OF KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY

No century in human history has experienced so many social

transformations and such radical ones as the twentieth century.

They, I submit, will turn out to be the most significant events of

this century, and its lasting legacy. In the developed free-market

countries—only one-fifth of the earth’s population, but the model

for the rest—work and workforce, society and polity, are all, in

the last decade of this century, qualitatively and quantitatively

different both from those of the first years of this century and

from anything ever experienced before in human history: different

in their configuration, in their processes, in their problems, and

in their structures.

Far smaller and far slower social changes in earlier periods

triggered violent intellectual and spiritual crises, rebellions,

and civil wars. The extreme social transformations of this century

have hardly caused any stir. They proceeded with a minimum of

friction, with a minimum of upheavals, and indeed with altogether

a minimum of attention from scholars, politicians, the press, and

the public.

To be sure, this century of ours may well have been the

cruelest and most violent in human history, with its world wars

and civil wars, its mass tortures, ethnic cleansings, and

genocides. But all these killings, all these horrors inflicted on

the human race by this century’s Weltbeglücker—those who establish

paradise on earthby killing off nonconformists, dissidents,

resisters, and innocent bystanders, whether Jews, the bourgeoisie,

kulaks, or intellectuals—hindsight clearly shows, were just that:

senseless killings, senseless horrors. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao,

the three evil geniuses of this century, destroyed. But they

created nothing.

Indeed, if this century proves anything, it is the futility of

politics. Even the most dogmatic believer in historical

determinism would have a hard time explaining the social

transformations of this century as caused by the headline-making

political events, or explaining the headline-making political

events as caused by the social transformations. But it is the

social transformations, running like ocean currents deep below the

hurricane-tormented surface of the sea, that have had the lasting,

indeed the permanent, effect. They—rather than all the violence of

the political surface—have transformed the society and the

economy, the community, the polity we live in.

Farmers and Domestic Servants

Before World War I, the largest single group in every country

were farmers.

Eighty years ago, on the eve of that war, it was considered

axiomatic that developed countries—North America being the only

exception—would increasingly become unable to feed themselves and

would increasingly have to rely on food imports from

nonindustrial, nondeveloped areas.

Today, only Japan, among major, developed, free-market

countries, is a heavy importer of food. (Unnecessarily so—its

weakness as a food producer is largely the result of an obsolete

rice-subsidy policy that prevents the country from developing a

modern, productive agriculture.) All other developed free-market

countries have become surplus food producers despite burgeoning

urban populations. In all these countries food production is today

many times what it was eighty years ago—in the United States,

eight to ten times as much.

But in all developed free-market countries—including

Japan—farmers today are, at most, 5 percent of population and

workforce, that is, one-tenth of what they were eighty years ago.

The second-largest group in population and workforce in every

developed country around 1900 were live-in servants. They were

considered as much a “law of nature” as farmers were. The British

census of 1910 defined “lower middle class” as a household

employing fewer than three servants. And while farmers as a

proportion of population and workforce had been steadily shrinking

throughout the nineteenth century, the numbers of domestic

servants, both absolutely and as a percentage, were steadily

growing right up to World War I. Eighty years later, live-in

domestic servants in developed countries have become practically

extinct. Few people born since World War II, that is, few people

under fifty, have even seen any except on the stage or in old

films.

Farmers and domestic servants were not only the largest social

groups, they were the oldest social groups, too. Together they

were, through the ages, the foundation of economy and society, the

foundation altogether of “civilization.”

The Rise and Fall of the Blue-collar Worker

One reason, indeed the main reason, why the transformation

caused so little stir was that by 1900 a new class, the

blue-collar worker in manufacturing industry (Marx’s

“proletarian”), had become socially dominant.

Early-twentieth-century society was obsessed with blue-collar

workers, fixated on them, bewitched by them.

The blue-collar worker became the “social question” of 1900

because he was the first “lower class” in history that could be

organized and stay organized.

No class in history has ever risen faster than the blue-collar

worker. And no class in history has ever fallen faster.

In 1883, the year of Marx’s death, “proletarians” were still a

minority of industrial workers. The majority were then skilled

workers employed in small craft shops each containing twenty or

thirty workers at most.

By 1900, the term “industrial worker” had become synonymous

with “machine operator” in a factory employing hundreds, if not

thousands, of people. These factory workers were indeed Marx’s

proletarians, without social position, without political power,

without economic or purchasing power.

The workers of 1900—and even of 1913—had no pension; no paid

vacation; no overtime pay; no extra pay for Sunday or night work;

no health insurance (except in Germany); no unemployment

compensation; no job security whatever. One of the earliest laws

to limit working hours for adult males—enacted in Austria in

1884—set the working day at eleven hours, six days a week.

Industrial workers, in 1913, everywhere worked a minimum of three

thousand hours a year. Their unions were still officially

proscribed or, at best, barely tolerated. But the workers had

shown their capacity to be organized. They had shown their

capacity to act as a “class.”

In the 1950s industrial blue-collar workers had become the

largest single group in every developed country, including the

Communist ones, though they were an actual majority only during

wartime. They had become eminently respectable. In all developed

free-market countries they had economically become “middle class.”

They had extensive job security; pensions; long, paid vacations;

comprehensive unemployment insurance or “lifetime employment.”

Above all, they had achieved political power. It was not only in

Britain that the labor unions were considered to be the “real

government,” with greater power than the prime minister and

Parliament.

In 1990, however, both the blue-collar worker and his union

were in total and irreversible retreat. They had become marginal

in numbers. Whereas blue-collar workers who made or moved things

had accounted for two-fifths of the American workforce in the

1950s, they accounted for less than one-fifth of the workforce in

the early 1990s—that is, for no more than they had accounted for

in 1900, when their meteoric rise had begun. In the other

developed free-market countries the decline was slower at first;

but after 1980 it began to accelerate everywhere. By the year 2000

or 2010, in every developed free-market country, blue-collar

industrial workers will account for no more than one-tenth or, at

most, one-eighth of the workforce. Union power has been going down

equally fast. Where in the 1950s and 1960s the National Union of

Mineworkers in the United Kingdom broke prime ministers as if they

were matchsticks, Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s won election

after election by being openly contemptuous of organized labor and

by whittling down its political power and its privileges. The

blue-collar worker in manufacturing industry and his union are

going the way of the farmer.

His place is already being taken by a “technologist,” that is,

by people who work both with their hands and their theoretical

knowledge. (Examples are computer technicians or paramedical

technicians such as X-ray technicians, physical therapists,

medical-lab technicians, pulmonary technicians, and so on, who

have been the fastest-growing group in the United States workforce

since 1980.)

And instead of a “class,” that is, a coherent, recognizable,

defined, and self-conscious group, the blue-collar worker in

manufacturing industry may soon be just another “pressure group.”

In contrast with Marxist and syndicalist predictions, the rise

of the industrial worker did not destabilize society. On the

contrary, it emerged as the century’s most stabilizing social

development. It explains why the disappearance of farmer and

domestic servant produced no social crises.

For farmer and domestic servant, industrial work was an

opportunity. It was in fact the first opportunity in social

history to better oneself substantially without having to

emigrate. In the developed, free-market countries, every

generation in the last 100 or 150 years could expect to do

substantially better than the generation preceding it. The main

reason was that farmers and domestic servants could and did become

industrial workers.

Because industrial workers were concentrated in groups, that

is, because they worked in a large factory rather than in a small

shop or in their homes, there could be a systematic focus on their

productivity. Beginning in 1881—two years before Marx’s death—the

systematic study of work, of both tasks and tools, has raised the

productivity of manual work (the making and moving of things) by 3

to 4 percent, compounded each year, for a total fiftyfold increase

in output per worker over a hundred years. On this rest all the

economic and social gains of the past century. And contrary to

what “everybody knew” in the nineteenth century—not only Marx but

all the “conservatives” as well, such as J. P. Morgan, Bismarck,

and Disraeli—practically all these gains have accrued to the

blue-collar worker, half of the gains in the form of sharply

reduced working hours (with the cuts ranging from 40 percent in

Japan to 50 percent in Germany), half of them in the form of a

twenty-fivefold increase in the real wages of blue-collar workers

making or moving things.

There were thus very good reasons why the rise of blue-collar

workers was peaceful rather than violent, let alone

“revolutionary.” But what explains that the fall of the

blue-collar worker has been equally peaceful and almost entirely

free of social protest, of upheaval, of serious dislocation, at

least in the United States?

The Rise of the Knowledge Worker

The rise of the “class” succeeding the industrial blue-collar

worker is not an opportunity to him. It is a challenge. The newly

emerging dominant group are “knowledge workers.” Knowledge workers

amount to a third or more of the workforce in the United States,

that is, to as large a proportion as industrial blue-collar

workers ever were, except in wartime. The majority of knowledge

workers are paid at least as well as blue-collar workers ever

were, or better. And the new jobs offer much greater opportunities

to the individual.

But—and it is a big but—the new jobs require, in the great

majority, qualifications the blue-collar worker does not possess

and is poorly equipped to acquire. The new jobs require a good

deal of formal education and the ability to acquire and to apply

theoretical and analytical knowledge. They require a different

approach to work and a different mind-set. Above all, they require

a habit of continual learning.

Displaced industrial workers thus cannot simply move into

knowledge work or services work the way displaced farmers and

displaced domestic workers moved into industrial work.

Even in communities that were totally dependent on one or two

mass-production plants that have gone out of business or have cut

employment by two-thirds—steel cities in western Pennsylvania or

eastern Ohio, for instance, or car cities like Flint,

Michigan—unemployment rates for adult, nonblack men and women fell

within a few short years to levels barely higher than the U.S.

average. And that means to levels barely higher than the U.S.

“full-employment” rate. And there has been no radicalization of

America’s blue-collar workers.

The only explanation is that for the nonblack, blue-collar

community the development came as no surprise, however unwelcome,

painful, and threatening to individual worker and individual

family. Psychologically—in terms of values perhaps, rather than in

terms of emotions—America’s industrial blue-collar workers must

have been prepared to accept as right and proper the shift to jobs

that require formal education and that pay for knowledge rather

than for manual work, whether skilled or unskilled.

One possible factor may have been the GI Bill of Rights after

World War II, which by offering a college education to every

returning American veteran established advanced education as the

“norm” and everything less as “substandard.” Another factor may

have been the draft the United States introduced in World War II

and maintained for thirty-five years afterward, as a result of

which the great majority of American male adults born between 1920

and 1950—and that means the majority of American adults alive

today—served in the military for several years where they were

forced to acquire a high-school education if they did not already

have one. But whatever the explanation, in the United States the

shift to knowledge work from blue-collar manual work making and

moving things has largely been accepted (except in the black

community) as appropriate or, at least, as inevitable.

In the United States the shift, by 1990 or so, had largely been

accomplished. But so far only in the United States. In the other

developed free-market countries, in western and northern Europe,

and in Japan, it was just beginning in the 1990s. It is, however,

certain to proceed rapidly in these countries from now on, and

perhaps to proceed there faster than it originally did in the

United States. Will it then also proceed, as it did by and large

in the United States, with a minimum of social upheaval, of social

dislocation, of social unrest? Or will the American development

turn out to be another example of “American exceptionalism” (as

has so much of American social history and especially of American

labor history)? In Japan, the superiority of formal education and

of the formally educated person is generally accepted so that the

fall of the industrial worker—still a fairly recent class in Japan

and outnumbering farmers and domestic servants only since well

after World War II—may well be accepted as appropriate as it has

been in the United States, and perhaps even more so. But what

about industrialized Europe—the United Kingdom, Germany, France,

Belgium, northern Italy, and so on—where there has been a

“working-class culture” and a “self-respecting working class” for

well over a century, and where, despite all evidence to the

contrary, the belief is still deeply ingrained that industrial,

blue-collar work, rather than knowledge, is the creator of all

wealth? Will Europe react the way the American black has reacted?

This surely is a key question, the answer to which will largely

determine the social as well as the economic future of the

developed free-market countries of Europe. And the answer will be

given within the next decade or so.

The Emerging Knowledge Society

Knowledge workers will not be the majority in the knowledge

society. But in many countries, if not most developed countries,

they will be the largest single group in the population and the

workforce. And even if outnumbered by other groups, knowledge

workers will be the group that gives the emerging knowledge

society its character, its leadership, its social profile. They

may not be the ruling class of the knowledge society, but they

already are its leading class. And in their characteristics, their

social position, their values, and their expectations, they differ

fundamentally from any group in history that has ever occupied the

leading, let alone the dominant, position.

In the first place, the knowledge worker gains access to work,

job, and social position through formal education.

The first implication of this is that education will become the

center of the knowledge society, and schooling its key

institution. What knowledge is required for everybody? What mix of

knowledges is required for everybody? What is “quality” in

learning and teaching? All these will, of necessity, become

central concerns of the knowledge society, and central political

issues. In fact, it may not be too fanciful to anticipate that the

acquisition and distribution of formal knowledge will come to

occupy the place in the politics of the knowledge society that

acquisition and distribution of property and income have occupied

in the two or three centuries that we have come to call the Age of

Capitalism.

We can also predict with high probability that we will redefine

what it means to be an “educated person.”

The knowledge society will inevitably become far more

competitive than any society we have yet known—for the simple

reason that with knowledge being universally accessible, there are

no excuses for nonperformance. There will be no “poor” countries.

There will only be ignorant countries. And the same will be true

for individual companies, individual industries, and individual

organizations of any kind. It will be true for the individual,

too. In fact, developed societies have already become infinitely

more competitive for the individual than were the societies of the

early twentieth century—let alone earlier societies, those of the

nineteenth or eighteenth centuries. Then, most people had no

opportunity to rise out of the “class” into which they were born,

with most individuals following their fathers in their work and in

their station in life.

But knowledge workers, whether their knowledge is primitive or

advanced, whether they possess a little of it or a great deal,

will, by definition, be specialized. Knowledge in application is

effective only when it is specialized. Indeed, it is more

effective, the more highly specialized it is.

Equally important is the second implication of the fact that

knowledge workers are, of necessity, specialists: the need for

them to work as members of an organization. It is only the

organization that can provide the basic continuity that knowledge

workers need to be effective. It is only the organization that can

convert the specialized knowledge of the knowledge worker into

performance.

By itself, specialized knowledge yields no performance. The

surgeon is not effective unless there is a diagnosis, which, by

and large, is not the surgeon’s task and not even within the

surgeon’s competence. Market researchers, by themselves, produce

only data. To convert the data into information, let alone to make

them effective in knowledge action, requires marketing people,

production people, service people. As a loner in his or her own

research and writing, the historian can be very effective. But to

produce the education of students, a great many other specialists

have to contribute—people whose speciality may be literature, or

mathematics, or other areas of history. And this requires that the

specialist have access to an organization.

This access may be as a consultant. It may be as a provider of

specialized services. But for a large number of knowledge workers,

it will be as employees of an organization—full-time or

part-time—whether a government agency, a hospital, a university, a

business, a labor union, or any of hundreds of others. In the

knowledge society, it is not the individual who performs. The

individual is a cost center rather than a performance center. It

is the organization that performs.

The Employee Society

The knowledge society is an employee society. Traditional

society, that is, society before the rise of the manufacturing

enterprise and the blue-collar manufacturing worker, was not a

society of independents. Thomas Jefferson’s society of independent

small farmers, each being the owner of his own family farm and

farming it without any help except for that of his wife and his

children, was never much more than fantasy. Most people in history

were dependents. But they did not work for an organization. They

were working for an owner, as slaves, as serfs, as hired hands on

the farm; as journeymen and apprentices in the craftsman’s shop;

as shop assistants and salespeople for a merchant; as domestic

servants, free or unfree; and so on. They worked for a “master.”

When blue-collar work in manufacturing first arose, they still

worked for a “master.”

In Charles Dickens’s great 1854 novel Hard Times, the workers

work for an “owner.” They do not work for the “factory.” Only late

in the nineteenth century did the factory rather than the owner

become the employer. And only in the twentieth century did the

corporation, rather than the factory, then become the employer.

Only in this century has the “master” been replaced by a “boss,”

who, himself, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is an employee

and has a boss himself.

Knowledge workers will be both “employees” who have a “boss”

and “bosses” who have “employees.”

Organizations were not known to yesterday’s social science, and

are, by and large, not yet known to today’s social science.

The first “organization” in the modern sense, the first that

was seen as being prototypical rather than exceptional, was surely

the modern business enterprise as it emerged after 1870—which is

why, to this day, most people think of “management,” as being

“business management.”

With the emergence of the knowledge society, we have become a

society of organizations. Most of us work in and for an

organization, are dependent for our effectiveness and equally for

our living on access to an organization, whether as an

organization’s employee or as a provider of services to an

organization—as a lawyer, for instance, or a freight forwarder.

And more and more of these supporting services to organizations

are, themselves, organized as organizations. The first law firm

was organized in the United States a little over a century

ago—until then lawyers had practiced as individuals. In Europe

there were no law firms to speak of until after World War II.

Today, the practice of law is increasingly done in larger and

larger partnerships. But that is also true, especially in the

United States, of the practice of medicine. The knowledge society

is a society of organizations in which practically every social

task is being performed in and through an organization.

Most knowledge workers will spend most if not all of their

working life as “employees.” But the meaning of the term is

different from what it has been traditionally—and not only in

English but in German, Spanish, and Japanese as well.

Individually, knowledge workers are dependent on the job. They

receive a wage or salary. They are being hired and can be fired.

Legally, each is an “employee.” But collectively, they are the

only “capitalists”; increasingly, through their pension funds and

through their other savings (e.g., in the United States through

mutual funds), the employees own the means of production. In

traditional economics (and by no means only in Marxist economics),

there is a sharp distinction between the “wage fund”—all of which

went into consumption—and the “capital fund.” And most social

theory of industrial society is based, one way or another, on the

relationship between the two, whether in conflict or in necessary

and beneficial cooperation and balance. In the knowledge society,

the two merge. The pension fund is “deferred wage” and, as such, a

wage fund. But it is also increasingly the main source of capital,

if not the only source of capital, for the knowledge society.

Equally important, and perhaps more important, is that in the

knowledge society the employees, that is, knowledge workers, again

own the tools of production. Marx’s great insight was the

realization that the factory worker does not and cannot own the

tools of production and, therefore, has to be “alienated.” There

was no way, Marx pointed out, for workers to own the steam engine

and to be able to take the steam engine with them when moving from

one job to another. The capitalist had to own the steam engine and

had to control it. Increasingly, the true investment in the

knowledge society is not in machines and tools. It is in the

knowledge worker. Without it, the machines, no matter how advanced

and sophisticated, are unproductive.

The industrial worker needed the capitalist infinitely more

than the capitalist needed the industrial worker—the basis for

Marx’s assertion that there would always be a surplus of

industrial workers, and an “industrial reserve army” that would

make sure that wages could not possibly rise above the subsistence

level (probably Marx’s most egregious error). In the knowledge

society the most probable assumption—and certainly the assumption

on which all organizations have to conduct their affairs—is that

they need the knowledge worker far more than the knowledge worker

needs them. It is up to the organization to market its knowledge

jobs so as to obtain knowledge workers in adequate quantity and

superior quality. The relationship increasingly is one of

interdependence with the knowledge worker having to learn what the

organization needs, but with the organization also having to learn

what the knowledge worker needs, requires, and expects.

One additional conclusion: because the knowledge society

perforce has to be a society of organizations, its central and

distinctive organ is management.

When we first began to talk of management, the term meant

“business management”—since large-scale business was the first of

the new organizations to become visible. But we have learned this

last half-century that management is the distinctive organ of all

organizations. All of them require management—whether they use the

term or not. All managers do the same things whatever the business

of their organization. All of them have to bring people—each of

them possessing a different knowledge—together for joint

performance. All of them have to make human strengths productive

in performance and human weaknesses irrelevant. All of them have

to think through what are “results” in the organization—and have

then to define objectives. All of them are responsible to think

through what I call the “theory of the business,” that is, the

assumptions on which the organization bases its performance and

actions, and equally, the assumptions that organizations make to

decide what things not to do. All of them require an organ that

thinks through strategies, that is, the means through which the

goals of the organization become performance. All of them have to

define the values of the organization, its system of rewards and

punishments, and with it its spirit and its culture. In all of

them, managers need both the knowledge of management as work and

discipline and the knowledge and understanding of the organization

itself, its purposes, its values, its environment and markets, its

core competencies.

Management as a practice is very old. The most successful

executive in all history was surely that Egyptian who, forty-seven

hundred years or more ago, first conceived the pyramid—without any

precedent—and designed and built it, and did so in record time.

With a durability unlike that of any other human work, that first

pyramid still stands. But as a discipline, management is barely

fifty years old. It was first dimly perceived around the time of

World War I. It did not emerge until World War II and then

primarily in the United States. Since then, it has been the

fastest-growing new business function, and its study the

fastest-growing new academic discipline. No function in history

has emerged as fast as management and managers have in the last

fifty to sixty years, and surely none has had such worldwide sweep

in such a short period.

Management, in most business schools, is still taught as a

bundle of techniques, such as the technique of budgeting. To be

sure, management, like any other work, has its own tools and its

own techniques. But just as the essence of medicine is not the

urinalysis, important though it is, the essence of management is

not techniques and procedures. The essence of management is to

make knowledge productive. Management, in other words, is a social

function. And in its practice, management is truly a “liberal

art.”

The Social Sector

The old communities—family, village, parish, and so on—have all

but disappeared in the knowledge society. Their place has largely

been taken by the new unit of social integration: the

organization. Where community membership was seen as fate,

organization membership is voluntary. Where community claimed the

entire person, organization is a means to a person’s end, a tool.

For two hundred years a hot debate has been raging, especially in

the West: are communities “organic” or are they simply extensions

of the person? Nobody would claim that the new organization is

“organic.” It is clearly an artifact, a human creation, a social

technology.

But who, then, does the social tasks? Two hundred years ago

social tasks were being done in all societies by the local

community—primarily, of course, by the family. Very few, if any,

of those tasks are now being done by the old communities. Nor

would they be capable of doing them. People no longer stay where

they were born, either in terms of geography or in terms of social

position and status. By definition, a knowledge society is a

society of mobility. And all the social functions of the old

communities, whether performed well or poorly (and most were

performed very poorly, indeed), presupposed that the individual

and the family would stay put. Family is where they have to take

you in, said a nineteenth-century adage; and community, to repeat,

was fate. To leave the community meant becoming an outcast,

perhaps even an outlaw. But the essence of a knowledge society is

mobility in terms of where one lives, mobility in terms of what

one does, mobility in terms of one’s affiliation.

This very mobility means that in the knowledge society, social

challenges and social tasks multiply. People no longer have

“roots.” People no longer have a “neighborhood” that controls

where they live, what they do, and indeed, what their “problems”

are allowed to be. The knowledge society, by definition, is a

competitive society; with knowledge accessible to everyone,

everyone is expected to place himself or herself, to improve

himself or herself, and to have aspirations. It is a society in

which many more people than ever before can be successful. But it

is therefore, by definition, also a society in which many more

people than ever before can fail, or at least can come in second.

And if only because the application of knowledge to work has made

developed societies so much richer than any earlier society could

even dream of becoming, the failures, whether poverty or

alcoholism, battered women or juvenile delinquents, are seen as

failures of society. In traditional society they were taken for

granted. In the knowledge society they are an affront, not just to

the sense of justice but equally to the competence of society and

its self-respect.

Who, then, in the knowledge society takes care of the social

tasks? We can no longer ignore them. But traditional community is

incapable of tackling them.

Two answers have emerged in this century—a majority answer and

a dissenting opinion. Both have been proven to be the wrong

answers.

The majority answer goes back more than a hundred years, to the

1880s, when Bismarck’s Germany took the first faltering steps

toward the welfare state. The answer: the problems of the social

sector can, should, and must be solved by government. It is still

probably the answer that most people accept, especially in the

developed countries of the West—even though most people probably

no longer fully believe it. But it has been totally disproven.

Modern government, especially since World War II, has become a

huge welfare bureaucracy everywhere. And the bulk of the budget in

every developed country today is devoted to “entitlements,” that

is, to payment for all kinds of social services. And yet, in every

developed country, society is becoming sicker rather than

healthier, and social problems are multiplying. Government has a

big role to play in social tasks—the role of policy-maker, of

standard setter, and, to a substantial extent, the role of

paymaster. But as the agency to run social services, it has proven

itself almost totally incompetent—and we now know why.

The second dissenting opinion was first formulated by me in my

1942 book The Future of Industrial Man. I argued then that the new

organization—and fifty years ago that meant the large business

enterprise—would have to be the community in which the individual

would find status and function, with the plant community becoming

the place in and through which the social tasks would be

organized. In Japan (though quite independently and without any

debt to me) the large employer—government agency or business—has

indeed increasingly attempted to become a “community” for its

employees. “Lifetime employment” is only one affirmation of this.

Company housing, company health plans, company vacations, and so

on, all emphasize for the Japanese employee that the employer, and

especially the big corporation, is the community and the successor

to yesterday’s village and to yesterday’s family. But this, too,

has not worked.

There is a need indeed, especially in the West, to bring the

employee increasingly into the government of the plan community.

What is now called “empowerment” is very similar to the things I

talked about more than fifty years ago. But it does not create a

community. And it does not create the structure through which the

social tasks of the knowledge society can be tackled. In fact,

practically all those tasks, whether providing education or health

care; addressing the anomalies and diseases of a developed and,

especially, of a rich society, such as alcohol and drug abuse; or

tackling the problems of incompetence and irresponsibility such as

those of the “underclass” in the American city—all lie outside the

employing institution.

The employing institution is, and will remain, an

“organization.” The relationship between it and the individual is

not that of “membership” in a “community,” that is, an

unbreakable, two-way bond.

To survive, it needs employment flexibility. But increasingly

also, knowledge workers, and especially people of advanced

knowledge, see the organization as the tool for the accomplishment

of their own purposes and, therefore, resent—increasingly even in

Japan—any attempt to subject them to the organization as a

community, that is, to the control of the organization; to the

demand of the organization that they commit themselves to lifetime

membership; and to the demand that they subordinate their own

aspirations to the goals and values of the organization. This is

inevitable because the possessor of knowledge, as said earlier,

owns his or her “tools of production” and has the freedom to move

to wherever opportunities for effectiveness, for accomplishment,

and for advancement seem greatest.

The right answer to the question, Who takes care of the social

challenges of the knowledge society? is thus neither the

government nor the employing organization. It is a separate and

new social sector.

Increasingly, these organizations of the social sector serve a

second and equally important purpose. They create citizenship.

Modern society and modern polity have become so big and complex

that citizenship, that is, responsible participation, is no longer

possible. All we can do as citizens is to vote once every few

years and to pay taxes all the time.

As a volunteer in the social sector institution, the individual

can again make a difference.

Nothing has been disproved faster than the concept of the

“organization man,” which was almost universally accepted forty

years ago. In fact, the more satisfying one’s knowledge work is,

the more one needs a separate sphere of community activity.

The New Pluralism

The emergence of the society of organizations challenges the

function of government. All social tasks in the society of

organizations are increasingly being done by individual

organizations, each created for one, and only one, social task,

whether education, health care, or street cleaning. Society,

therefore, is rapidly becoming pluralist. Yet our social and

political theories still assume a society in which there are no

power centers except government. To destroy or at least to render

impotent all other power centers was, in fact, the thrust of

Western history and Western politics for five hundred years, from

the fourteenth century on. It culminated in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries when (except in the United States) such

original institutions as still survived—for example, the

universities or the established churches—all became organs of the

state, with their functionaries becoming civil servants. But then,

immediately beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, new centers

arose—the first one, the modern business enterprise, emerged

around 1870. And since then one new organization after another has

come into being.

In the pluralism of yesterday, the feudalism of Europe’s Middle

Ages, or of Edo Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

all pluralist organizations, whether a feudal baron in the England

of the War of the Roses or the daimyo—the local lord—in Edo Japan,

tried to be in control of whatever went on in their community. At

least they tried to prevent anybody else from having control of

any community concern or community institution within their

domain.

But in the society of organizations, each of the new

institutions is concerned only with its own purpose and mission.

It does not claim power over anything else. But it also does not

assume responsibility for anything else. Who then is concerned

with the common good?

This has always been a central problem of pluralism. No earlier

pluralism solved it. The problem is coming back now, but in a

different guise. So far it has been seen as imposing limits on

these institutions, that is, forbidding them to do things in the

pursuit of their own mission, function, and interest that encroach

upon the public domain or violate public policy. The laws against

discrimination—by race, sex, age, education, health, and so

on—that have proliferated in the United States in the last forty

years all forbid socially undesirable behavior. But we are

increasingly raising the question of the “social responsibility”

of these institutions: What do these institutions have to do—in

addition to discharging their own functions—to advance the public

good? This, however—though nobody seems to realize it—is a demand

to return to the old pluralism, the pluralism of feudalism. It is

a demand for “private hands to assume public power.”

That this could seriously threaten the functioning of the new

organizations the example of the school in the United States makes

abundantly clear.

The new pluralism has the old problem of pluralism—who takes

care of the common good when the dominant institutions of society

are single-purpose institutions? But it also has a new problem:

how to maintain the performance capacity of the new institutions

and yet maintain the cohesion of society? This makes doubly

important the emergence of a strong and functioning social sector.

It is an additional reason why the social sector will increasingly

be crucial to the performance, if not to the cohesion, of the

knowledge society.

As soon as knowledge became the key economic resource, the

integration of the interests—and with it the integration of the

pluralism of a modern polity—began to fall apart. Increasingly,

noneconomic interests are becoming the new pluralism, the “special

interests,” the “single-cause” organizations, and so on.

Increasingly, politics is not about “who gets what, when, how” but

about values, each of them considered to be an absolute. Politics

is about “the right to live” of the embryo in the womb as against

the right of a woman to control her own body and to abort an

embryo. It is about the environment. It is about gaining equality

for groups alleged to be oppressed and discriminated against. None

of these issues is economic. All are fundamentally moral.

Economic interests can be compromised, which is the great

strength of basing politics on economic interests. “Half a loaf is

still bread” is a meaningful saying. But “half a baby,” in the

biblical story of the judgment of Solomon, is not half a child.

Half a baby is a corpse and a chunk of meat. There is no

compromise possible. To an environmentalist, “half an endangered

species” is an extinct species.

This greatly aggravates the crisis of modern government.

Newspapers and commentators still tend to report in economic terms

what goes on in Washington, in London, in Bonn, or in Tokyo. But

more and more of the lobbyists who determine governmental laws and

governmental actions are no longer lobbyists for economic

interests. They lobby for and against measures they—and their

paymasters—see as moral, spiritual, cultural. And each of these

new moral concerns, each represented by a new organization, claims

to stand for an absolute. Dividing their loaf is not compromising.

It is treason.

There is thus in the society of organizations no single

integrating force that pulls individual organizations in society

and community into coalition. The traditional parties—perhaps the

most successful political creations of the nineteenth century—no

longer can integrate divergent groups and divergent points of view

into a common pursuit of power. Rather, they become battlefields

for these groups, each of them fighting for absolute victory and

not content with anything but total surrender of the enemy.

This raises the question of how government can be made to

function again. In countries with a tradition of a strong

independent bureaucracy, notably Japan, Germany, and France, the

civil service still tries to hold government together. But even in

these countries the cohesion of government is increasingly being

weakened by the special interests and, above all, by the

noneconomic, the moral, special interests.

Since Machiavelli, almost five hundred years ago, political

science has primarily concerned itself with power. Machiavelli—and

political scientists and politicians since him—took it for granted

that government can function once it has power. Now, increasingly,

the questions to be tackled are: What are the functions that

government and only government can discharge and that government

must discharge? and How can government be organized so that it can

discharge those functions in a society of organizations?

The twenty-first century will surely be one of continuing

social, economic, and political turmoil and challenge, at least in

its early decades. The Age of Social Transformations is not over

yet. And the challenges looming ahead may be more serious and more

daunting still than those posed by the social transformations of

the twentieth century that have already happened.

Yet we will not even have a chance to resolve these new and

looming problems of tomorrow unless we first address the

challenges posed by the developments that are already accomplished

facts. If the twentieth century was one of social transformations,

the twenty-first century needs to be one of social and political

innovations.

24.

THE COMING OF

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY

Every generation needs a new revolution,” was Thomas

Jefferson’s conclusion toward the end of his long life. His

contemporary, Goethe, the great German poet, though an

archconservative, voiced the same sentiment when he sang in his

old age: “Vernunft wird Unsinn/Wohltat, Plage.” (Reason becomes

nonsense/Boons afflictions.)

Both Jefferson and Goethe were expressing their generation’s

disenchantment with the legacy of Enlightenment and French

Revolution. But they might just as well have reflected on our

present-day legacy, 150 years later, of that great shining

promise, the welfare state, begun in Imperial Germany for the

truly indigent and disabled, which has now become “everybody’s

entitlement” and an increasing burden on those who produce.

Institutions, systems, policies, eventually outlive themselves, as

do products, processes, and services. They do it when they

accomplish their objectives and they do it when they fail to

accomplish their objectives. The mechanisms may still tick. But

the assumptions on which they were designed have become

invalid—as, for example, have the demographic assumptions on which

health-care plans and retirement schemes were designed in all

developed countries over the last hundred years. Then, indeed,

reason becomes nonsense and boons afflictions.

Yet “revolutions,” as we have learned since Jefferson’s days,

are not the remedy. They cannot be predicted, directed, or

controlled. They bring to power the wrong people. Worst of all,

their results—predictably—are the exact opposite of their

promises. Only a few years after Jefferson’s death in 1826, that

great anatomist of government and politics, Alexis de Tocqueville,

pointed out that revolutions do not demolish the prisons of the

old regime; they enlarge them. The most lasting legacy of the

French Revolution, Tocqueville proved, was the tightening of the

very fetters of pre-Revolutionary France: the subjection of the

whole country to an uncontrolled and uncontrollable bureaucracy,

and the centralization in Paris of all political, intellectual,

artistic, and economic life. The main consequences of the Russian

Revolution were new serfdom for the tillers of the land, an

omnipotent secret police, and a rigid, corrupt, stifling

bureaucracy—the very features of the czarist regime against which

Russian liberals and revolutionaries had protested most loudly and

with most justification. And the same must be said of Mao’s

macabre “Great Cultural Revolution.”

Indeed, we now know that “revolution” is a delusion, the

pervasive delusion of the nineteenth century, but today perhaps

the most discredited of its myths. We now know that “revolution”

is not achievement and the new dawn. It results from senile decay,

from the bankruptcy of ideas and institutions, from failure of

self-renewal.

And yet we also know that theories, values, and all the

artifacts of human minds and human hands do age and rigidify,

becoming obsolete, becoming “afflictions.”

Innovation and entrepreneurship are thus needed in society as

much as in the economy, in public-service institutions as much as

in businesses. It is precisely because innovation and

entrepreneurship are not “root and branch” but “one step at a

time,” a product here, a policy there, a public service yonder;

because they are not planned but focused on this opportunity and

that need; because they are tentative and will disappear if they

do not produce the expected and needed results; because, in other

words, they are pragmatic rather than dogmatic and modest rather

than grandiose—that they promise to keep any society, economy,

industry, public service, or business flexible and self-renewing.

They achieve what Jefferson hoped to achieve through revolution in

every generation, and they do so without bloodshed, civil war, or

concentration camps, without economic catastrophe, but with

purpose, with direction, and under control.

What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation

and entrepreneurship are normal, steady, and continual. Just as

management has become the specific organ of all contemporary

institutions, and the integrating organ of our society of

organizations, so innovation and entrepreneurship have to become

an integral life-sustaining activity in our organizations, our

economy, our society.

This requires of executives in all institutions that they make

innovation and entrepreneurship a normal, ongoing, everyday

activity, a practice in their own work and in that of their

organization.

Planning Does Not Work

The first priority in talking about the public policies and

governmental measures needed in the entrepreneurial society is to

define what will not work—especially as the policies that will not

work are so popular today.

“Planning” as the term is commonly understood is actually

incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy.

Innovation does indeed need to be purposeful and entrepreneurship

has to be managed. But innovation, almost by definition, has to be

decentralized, ad hoc, autonomous, specific, and microeconomic. It

had better start small, tentative, flexible. Indeed, the

opportunities for innovation are found, on the whole, only way

down and close to events. They are not to be found in the massive

aggregates with which the planner deals of necessity, but in the

deviations therefrom—in the unexpected, in the incongruity, in the

difference between “the glass half full” and “the glass half

empty,” in the weak link in a process. By the time the deviation

becomes “statistically significant” and thereby visible to the

planner, it is too late. Innovative opportunities do not come with

the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.

Systematic Abandonment

One of the fundamental changes in worldview and perception of

the last twenty years—a truly monumental turn—is the realization

that governmental policies and agencies are of human rather than

of divine origin, and that therefore the one thing certain about

them is that they will become obsolete fairly fast. Yet politics

is still based on the age-old assumption that whatever government

does is grounded in the nature of human society and therefore

“forever.” As a result no political mechanism has so far arisen to

slough off the old, the outworn, the no-longer-productive in

government.

Or rather, what we have is not working yet. In the United

States there has lately been a rash of “sunset laws,” which

prescribe that a governmental agency or a public law lapse after a

certain period of time unless specifically reenacted. These laws

have not worked, however—in part because there are no objective

criteria to determine when an agency or a law becomes

dysfunctional, in part because there is so far no organized

process of abandonment, but perhaps mostly because we have not yet

learned to develop new or alternative methods for achieving what

an ineffectual law or agency was originally supposed to achieve.

To develop both the principles and the process for making “sunset

laws” meaningful and effective is one of the important social

innovations ahead of us—and one that needs to be made soon. Our

societies are ready for it.

A Challenge for the Individuals

In an entrepreneurial society individuals face a tremendous

challenge, a challenge they need to exploit as an opportunity: the

need for continual learning and relearning.

In traditional society it could be assumed—and was assumed—that

learning came to an end with adolescence or, at the latest, with

adulthood. What one had not learned by age twenty-one or so, one

would never learn. But also what one had learned by age twenty-one

or so one would apply, unchanged, the rest of one’s life. On these

assumptions was based traditional apprenticeship, traditional

crafts, traditional professions, but also the traditional systems

of education and the schools. Crafts, professions, systems of

education, and schools are still, by and large, based on these

assumptions. There were, of course, always exceptions, some groups

that practiced continual learning and relearning: the great

artists and the great scholars, Zen monks, mystics, the Jesuits.

But these exceptions were so few that they could safely be

ignored.

In an entrepreneurial society, however, these “exceptions”

become the exemplars. The correct assumption in an entrepreneurial

society is that individuals will have to learn new things well

after they have become adults—and maybe more than once. The

correct assumption is that what individuals have learned by age

twenty-one will begin to become obsolete five to ten years later

and will have to be replaced—or at least refurbished—by new

learning, new skills, new knowledge.

One implication of this is that individuals will increasingly

have to take responsibility for their own continual learning and

relearning, for their own self-development and for their own

careers. They can no longer assume that what they have learned as

children and youngsters will be the “foundation” for the rest of

their lives. It will be the “launching pad”—the place to take off

from rather than the place to build on and to rest on. They can no

longer assume that they “enter upon a career” that then proceeds

along a predetermined, well-mapped, and well-lighted “career path”

to a known destination—what the American military calls

“progressing in grade.” The assumption from now on has to be that

individuals on their own will have to find, determine, and develop

a number of “careers” during their working lives.

And the more highly schooled the individuals, the more

entrepreneurial their careers and the more demanding their

learning challenges. The carpenter can still assume, perhaps, that

the skills he acquired as apprentice and journeyman will serve him

forty years later. Physicians, engineers, metallurgists, chemists,

accountants, lawyers, teachers, managers, had better assume that

the skills, knowledges, and tools they will have to master and

apply fifteen years hence are going to be different and new.

Indeed, they better assume that fifteen years hence they will be

doing new and quite different things, will have new and different

goals and, indeed, in many cases, different “careers.” And only

they themselves can take responsibility for the necessary learning

and relearning, and for directing themselves. Tradition,

convention, and “corporate policy” will be a hindrance rather than

a help.

This also means that an entrepreneurial society challenges

habits and assumptions of schooling and learning. The educational

systems the world over are in the main extensions of what Europe

developed in the seventeenth century. There have been substantial

additions and modifications. But the basic architectural plan on

which our schools and universities are built goes back three

hundred years and more. Now new, in some cases radically new,

thinking and new, in some cases radically new, approaches are

required, and on all levels.

Using computers in preschool may turn out to be a passing fad.

But four-year-olds exposed to television expect, demand, and

respond to very different pedagogy than four-year-olds did fifty

years ago.

Young people headed for a “profession”—that is, four-fifths of

today’s college students—do need a “liberal education.” But that

clearly means something quite different from the

nineteenth-century version of the seventeenth-century curriculum

that passed for a “liberal education” in the English-speaking

world or for “Allgemeine Bildung” in Germany. If this challenge is

not faced up to, we risk losing the fundamental concept of a

“liberal education” altogether and will descend into the purely

vocational, purely specialized, which would endanger the

educational foundation of the community and, in the end, community

itself. But also educators will have to accept that schooling is

not for the young only and that the greatest challenge—but also

the greatest opportunity—for the school is the continuing

relearning of already highly schooled adults.

So far we have no educational theory for these tasks.

So far we have no one who does what, in the seventeenth

century, the great Czech educational reformer Johann Comenius did

or what the Jesuit educators did when they developed what to this

day is the “modern” school and the “modern” university.

But in the United States, at least, practice is far ahead of

theory. To me the most positive development in the last twenty

years, and the most encouraging one, is the ferment of educational

experimentation in the United States—a happy by-product of the

absence of a “Ministry of Education”—in respect to the continuing

learning and relearning of adults, and especially of highly

schooled professionals. Without a “master plan,” without

“educational philosophy,” and, indeed, without much support from

the educational establishment, the continuing education and

professional development of already highly educated and highly

achieving adults has become the true “growth industry” in the

United States in the last twenty years.

The emergence of the entrepreneurial society may be a major

turning point in history.

A hundred years ago the worldwide panic of 1873 terminated the

century of laissez-faire that had begun with the publication of

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776. In the panic of 1873 the

modern welfare state was born. A hundred years later it had run

its course, almost everyone now knows. It may survive despite the

demographic challenges of an aging population and a shrinking

birthrate. But it will survive only if the entrepreneurial economy

succeeds in greatly raising productivities. We may even still make

a few minor additions to the welfare edifice, put on a room here

or a new benefit there. But the welfare state is past rather than

future—as even the old liberals now know.

Will its successor be the entrepreneurial society?

25.

CITIZENSHIP THROUGH

THE SOCIAL SECTOR

Social needs will grow in two areas. They will grow, first, in

what has traditionally been considered charity: helping the poor,

the disabled, the helpless, the victims. And they will grow,

perhaps even faster, in respect to services that aim at changing

the community and at changing people.

In a transition period, the number of people in need always

grows. There are the huge masses of refugees all over the globe,

victims of war and social upheaval, of racial, ethnic, political,

and religious persecution, of government incompetence and of

government cruelty. Even in the most settled and stable societies

people will be left behind in the shift to knowledge work. It

takes a generation or two before a society and its population

catch up with radical changes in the composition of the workforce

and in the demands for skills and knowledge. It takes some

time—the best part of a generation, judging by historical

experience—before the productivity of service workers can be

raised sufficiently to provide them with a “middle-class” standard

of living.

The needs will grow equally—perhaps even faster—in the second

area of social services, services that do not dispense charity but

attempt to make a difference in the community and to change

people. Such services were practically unknown in earlier times,

whereas charity has been with us for millennia. But they have

mushroomed in the last hundred years, especially in the United

States.

These services will be needed even more urgently in the next

decades. One reason is the rapid increase in the number of elderly

people in all developed countries, many of whom live alone and

want to live alone. A second reason is the growing sophistication

of health care and medical care, calling for health-care research,

health-care education, and for more and more medical and hospital

facilities. Then there is the growing need for continuing

education of adults, and the need created by the growing number of

one-parent families. The community-service sector is likely to be

one of the true “growth sectors” of developed economies, whereas

we can hope that the need for charity will eventually subside

again.

A “Third Sector”

None of the U.S. programs of the last forty years in which we

tried to tackle a social problem through government action has

produced significant results. But independent nonprofit agencies

have had impressive results. Public schools in inner cities—for

example, New York, Detroit, and Chicago—have been going downhill

at an alarming rate. Church-run schools (especially schools of the

Roman Catholic dioceses) have had startling successes—in the same

communities, and with children from similarly broken families and

of similar racial and ethnic groups. The only successes in

fighting alcoholism and drug abuse (very substantial ones) have

been achieved by such independent organizations as Alcoholics

Anonymous, the Salvation Army, and the Samaritans. The only

successes in getting “welfare mothers”—single mothers, often black

or Hispanic—off welfare and back into paid work and a stable

family life have been achieved by autonomous, nonprofit

organizations such as the Judson Center in Royal Oak, Michigan.

Improvements in major health-care areas such as the prevention and

treatment of cardiac disease and of mental illness have largely

been the work of independent nonprofit organizations. The American

Heart Association and the American Mental Health Association, for

instance, have sponsored the necessary research and taken the lead

in educating both the medical community and the public in

prevention and treatment.

To foster autonomous community organizations in the social

sector is therefore an important step in turning government around

and making it perform again.

But the greatest contribution that the autonomous community

organization makes is as a new center of meaningful citizenship.

The megastate has all but destroyed citizenship. To restore it,

the postcapitalist polity needs a “third sector,” in addition to

the two generally recognized ones, the “private sector” of

business and the “public sector” of government. It needs an

autonomous social sector.

In the megastate, political citizenship can no longer function.

Even if the country is small, the affairs of government are so far

away that individuals cannot make a difference.

Individuals can vote—and we have learned the hard way these

last decades how important the right to vote is. Individuals can

pay taxes—and again we have learned the hard way these last

decades that this is a meaningful obligation.

The individuals cannot take responsibility, cannot take action

to make a difference. Without citizenship, however, the polity is

empty. There can be nationalism, but without citizenship, it is

likely to degenerate from patriotism into chauvinism. Without

citizenship, there cannot be that responsible commitment that

creates the citizen and that in the last analysis holds together

the body politic. Nor can there be the sense of satisfaction and

pride that comes from making a difference. Without citizenship,

the political unit, whether called “state” or “empire,” can only

be a power. Power is then the only thing that holds it together.

In order to be able to act in a rapidly changing and dangerous

world, the postcapitalist polity must re-create citizenship.

The Need for Community

Equally, there is a need to restore community. Traditional

communities no longer have much integrating power; they cannot

survive the mobility that knowledge confers on the individual.

Traditional communities, we have now learned, were held together

far less by what their members had in common than by necessity, if

not by coercion and fear.

The traditional family was a necessity. In nineteenth-century

fiction most families were what we would now call “broken

families.” But they had to stay together, no matter how great

their hatred, their loathing, their fear of each other. Family is

where they have to take you in, was a nineteenth-century saying.

Family before this century provided practically all the social

services available.

To cling to family was a necessity; to be repudiated by it, a

catastrophe. A stock figure of American plays and movies as late

as the 1920s was the cruel father who threw out his daughter when

she came home with an illegitimate child. She then had only two

choices: to commit suicide or to become a prostitute.

Today, family is actually becoming more important to most

people. But it is becoming so as a voluntary bond, as a bond of

affection, of attachment, of mutual respect, rather than one of

necessity. Today’s young people, once they have grown out of

adolescent rebellion, feel a much greater need than my generation

did to be close to their parents and to their siblings.

Still, family no longer makes up the community. But people do

need a community. They need it particularly in the sprawling huge

cities and suburbs in which more and more of us live. One can no

longer count—as one could in the rural village—on neighbors who

share the same interests, the same occupations, the same

ignorance, and who live together in the same world. Even if the

bond is close, one cannot count on family. Geographic and

occupational mobility mean that people no longer stay in the

place, class, or culture where they were born, where their parents

live, where their siblings and their cousins live. The community

that is needed in postcapitalist society—and needed especially by

the knowledge worker—has to be based on commitment and compassion

rather than being imposed by proximity and isolation.

Forty years ago, I thought that this community would come into

being at the place of work. In The Future of Industrial Man

(1942), The New Society (1949), and The Practice of Management

(1954), I talked of the plant community as the place that would

grant the individual status and function, as well as the

responsibility of self-government. But even in Japan, the plant

community is not going to work much longer. It is becoming

increasingly clear that the Japanese plant community is based far

less on a sense of belonging than on fear. A worker in a large

Japanese company with its seniority wage system who loses his job

past age thirty has become virtually unemployable for the rest of

his life.

In the West, the plant community never took root. I still

strongly maintain that the employee has to be given the maximum

responsibility and self-control—the idea that underlay my advocacy

of the plant community. The knowledge-based organization has to

become a responsibility-based organization.

But individuals, and especially knowledge workers, need an

additional sphere of social life, of personal relationships, and

of contribution outside and beyond the job, outside and beyond the

organization, indeed, outside and beyond their own specialized

knowledge area.

The Volunteer as Citizen

The one area in which this need can be satisfied is the social

sector. There, individuals can contribute. They can have

responsibility. They can make a difference. They can be

“volunteers.”

This is already happening in the United States.

The denominational diversity of American churches; the strong

emphasis on local autonomy of states, counties, cities; and the

community tradition of isolated frontier settlements all slowed

down the politicization and centralization of social activities in

the United States. As a result, America now has almost one million

nonprofit organizations active in the social sector. They

represent as much as one-tenth of the gross national

product—one-quarter of that sum raised by donations from the

public, another quarter paid by government for specific work

(e.g., to administer health-care reimbursement programs), the rest

fees for services rendered (e.g., tuition paid by students

attending private universities or money made by the art stores to

be found now in every American museum).

The nonprofits have become America’s biggest employer. Every

other American adult (90 million people all told) works at least

three hours a week as “unpaid staff,” that is, as a volunteer for

a nonprofit organization, for churches and hospitals; for

health-care agencies, for community services like Red Cross, Boy

Scouts, and Girl Scouts; for rehabilitation services like

Salvation Army and Alcoholics Anonymous; for shelters for battered

wives; and for tutoring services in inner-city schools. By the

year 2000 or 2010, the number of such unpaid staff people should

have risen to 120 million, and their average hours of work to five

per week.

These volunteers are no longer “helpers”; they have become

“partners.” Nonprofit organizations in the United States

increasingly have a full-time paid executive, but the rest of the

management team are volunteers. Increasingly, they run the

organization.

The greatest change has taken place in the American Catholic

Church. In one major diocese, lay women now actually run all the

parishes as “parish administrators.” The priests say mass and

dispense the sacraments. Everything else, including all the social

and community work of the parishes, is done by “unpaid staff,” led

by the parish administrator.

The main reason for this upsurge of volunteer participation in

the United States is not an increase in need. The main reason is

the search on the part of the volunteers for community, for

commitment, for contribution. The great bulk of the new volunteers

are not retired people; they are husbands and wives in the

professional, two-earner family, people in their thirties and

forties, well educated, affluent, busy. They enjoy their jobs. But

they feel the need to do something where “we can make a

difference,” to use the phrase one hears again and again—whether

that means running a Bible class in the local church; teaching

disadvantaged children the multiplication tables; or visiting old

people back home from a long stay in the hospital and helping them

with their rehabilitation exercises.

What the U.S. nonprofits do for their volunteers may well be

just as important as what they do for the recipients of their

services.

The Girl Scouts of America is one of the few American

organizations that has become racially integrated. In their

troops, girls regardless of color or national origin work together

and play together. But the greatest contribution of the

integration drive that the Girl Scouts began in the 1970s is that

it recruited a large number of mothers—Black, Asian, Hispanic—into

leadership positions as volunteers in integrated community work.

Citizenship in and through the social sector is not a panacea

for the ills of postcapitalist society and postcapitalist polity,

but it may be a prerequisite for tackling these ills. It restores

the civic responsibility that is the mark of citizenship, and the

civic pride that is the mark of community.

The need is greatest where community and community

organizations—and citizenship altogether—have been so thoroughly

damaged as to have been almost totally destroyed: in the

ex-Communist countries. Government in these countries has not only

been totally discredited; it has become totally impotent. It may

take years before the successor governments to the Communists—in

Czechoslovakia and Kazakhstan, in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine—can

competently carry out the tasks that only government can do:

managing money and taxes; running the military and the courts;

conducting foreign relations. In the meantime, only autonomous,

local nonprofits—organizations of the social sector based on

volunteers and releasing the spiritual energies of people—can

provide both the social services that the society needs and the

leadership development that the polity needs.

Different societies and different countries will surely

structure the social sector very differently. But every developed

country needs an autonomous, self-governing social sector of

community organizations—to provide the requisite community

services, but above all to restore the bonds of community and a

sense of active citizenship. Historically, community was fate. In

the postcapitalist society and polity, community has to become

commitment.

26.

FROM ANALYSIS TO

PERCEPTION—THE NEW

WORLDVIEW

Around 1680 a French physicist, Denis Papin, then working in

Germany—as a Protestant he had been forced to leave his native

country—invented the steam engine. Whether he actually built one

we do not know; but he designed one, and he actually put together

the first safety valve. A generation later, in 1712, Thomas

Newcomen then put the first working steam engine into an English

coal mine. This made it possible for coal to be mined—until then

groundwater had always flooded English mines. With Newcomen’s

engine, the Age of Steam was on. Thereafter, for 250 years, the

model of technology was mechanical. Fossil fuels rapidly became

the main source of energy. And the ultimate source of motive power

was what happens inside a star, that is, the sun. In 1945, atomic

fission and, a few years later, fusion replicated what occurs in

the sun. There is no going beyond this. In 1945, the era in which

the mechanical universe was the model came to an end. Just a year

later, in 1946, the first computer, the ENIAC, came on stream. And

with it began an age in which information will be the organizing

principle for work. Information, however, is the basic principle

of biological rather than of mechanical processes.

Very few events have as much impact on civilization as a change

in the basic principle for organizing work. Up until a.d. 800 or

900, China was far ahead of any Western country in technology, in

science, and in culture and civilization generally. Then the

Benedictine monks in northern Europe found new sources of energy.

Until that point the main source of energy, if not the only one,

had been a two-legged animal called man. It was the peasant’s wife

who pulled the plow. The horse collar for the first time made it

possible to replace the farmer’s wife with animal power. And the

Benedictines also converted what in antiquity were toys,

waterwheel and windmill, into the first machines. Within two

hundred years technological leadership shifted from China to the

Occident. Seven hundred years later Papin’s steam engine created a

new technology and with it a new worldview—the mechanical

universe.

In 1946, with the advent of the computer, information became

the organizing principle of production. With this, a new basic

civilization came into being.

The Social Impacts of Information

A great deal these days (almost too much) is being said and

written about the impact of the information technologies on the

material civilization, on goods, services, and businesses. The

social impacts are, however, as important; indeed, they may be

more important. One of the impacts is widely noticed: any such

change triggers an explosion of entrepreneurship. In fact, the

entrepreneurial surge that began in the United States in the late

1970s, and which within ten years had spread to all non-Communist

developed countries, is the fourth such surge since Denis Papin’s

time three hundred years ago. The first one ran from the middle of

the seventeenth century through the early years of the eighteenth

century; it was triggered by the “Commercial Revolution,” the

tremendous expansion of trade following the development of the

first oceangoing freighter that could actually carry heavy

payloads over large distances. The second entrepreneurial

surge—beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century and

running to the middle of the nineteenth—was what we commonly call

the Industrial Revolution. Then, around 1870, the third

entrepreneurial surge was triggered by the new industries—the

first ones that did not just apply different motive power but

actually turned out products that had never been made before or

only in minute quantities: electricity, telephone, electronics,

steel, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, automobiles and airplanes.

We are now in a fourth surge, triggered by information and

biology. Like the earlier entrepreneurial surges, the present one

is not confined to “high tech”; it embraces equally “middle tech,”

“low tech,” and “no tech.” Like the earlier ones, it is not

confined to new or small enterprises, but is carried by existing

and big ones as well—and often with the greatest impact and

effectiveness. And, like the earlier surges, it is not confined to

“inventions,” that is, to technology. Social innovations are

equally “entrepreneurial” and equally important. Some of the

social innovations of the Industrial Revolution—the modern army,

the civil service, the postal service, the commercial bank—have

surely had as much impact as railroad or steamship. Similarly, the

present age of entrepreneurship will be as important for its

social innovations—and especially for innovations in politics,

government, education, and economics—as for any new technology or

material product.

Another important social impact of information is also visible

and widely discussed: the impact on the national state and,

particularly, on that twentieth-century hypertrophy of the

national state, the totalitarian regime. Itself a creature of the

modern media, newspapers, movies, and radio, it can exist only if

it has total control of information. But with everyone being able

to receive information directly from a satellite in the home—and

on “dishes” already so small that no secret police can hope to

find them—control of information by government is no longer

possible. Indeed, information is now transnational; like money,

information has no “fatherland.”

Since information knows no national boundaries, it will also

form new “transnational” communities of people who, maybe without

ever seeing each other in the flesh, are in communion because they

are in communication. The world economy, especially the “symbol

economy” of money and credit, is already one of the nonnational,

transnational communities.

Other social impacts are just as important but rarely seen or

discussed. One of them is the likely transformation of the

twentieth-century city. Today’s city was created by the great

breakthrough of the nineteenth century: the ability to move people

to work by means of train and streetcar, bicycle and automobile.

It will be transformed by the great twentieth-century

breakthrough: the ability to move work to people by moving ideas

and information. In fact, the city—central Tokyo, central New

York, central Los Angeles, central London, central Paris, central

Bombay—has already outlived its usefulness. We no longer can move

people into and out of it, as witness the two-hour trips in packed

railroad cars to reach the Tokyo or New York office building, the

chaos in London’s Piccadilly Circus, or the two-hour traffic jams

on the Los Angeles freeways every morning and evening. We are

already beginning to move the information to where the people

are—outside the cities—in such work as the handling of credit

cards, of engineering designs, of insurance policies and insurance

claims, or of medical records. Increasingly, people will work in

their homes or, as many more are likely to do, in small “office

satellites” outside the crowded central city. The facsimile

machine, the telephone, the two-way video screen, the telex, the

teleconference, are taking over from railroad, automobile, and

from airplane as well. The real-estate boom in all the big cities

in the 1970s and ‘80s, and the attendant skyscraper explosion, are

not signs of health. They signal the beginning of the end of the

central city. The decline may be slow; but we no longer need that

great achievement, the central city, at least not in its present

form.

The city might become an information center rather than a

center for work—the place from which information (news, data,

music) radiates. It might resemble the medieval cathedral where

the peasants from the surrounding countryside congregated once or

twice a year at the great feast days; in between, it stood empty

except for its learned clerics and its cathedral school. And will

tomorrow’s university be a “knowledge center” that transmits

information, rather than a place that students actually attend?

Where work is done determines in large measure also how it is

done. It strongly affects what work is being done. That there will

be great changes we can be certain—but how and when so far we

cannot even guess.

Form and Function

The question of the right size for a given task or a given

organization will become a central challenge. Greater performance

in a mechanical system is obtained by scaling up. Greater power

means greater output: bigger is better. But this does not hold for

biological systems. There size follows function.

It would surely be counterproductive for the cockroach to be

big, and equally counterproductive for the elephant to be small.

As biologists are fond of saying, The rat knows everything it

needs to be successful as a rat. Whether the rat is more

intelligent than the human being is a stupid question; in what it

takes to be successful as a rat, the rat is way ahead of any other

animal, including the human being. In an information-based

society, bigness becomes a “function” and a dependent, rather than

an independent, variable. In fact, the characteristics of

information imply that the smallest effective size will be best.

“Bigger” will be “better” only if the task cannot be done

otherwise.

For communication to be effective, there has to be both

information and meaning. And meaning requires communion. If

somebody whose language I do not speak calls me on the telephone,

it doesn’t help me at all that the connection is crystal clear.

There is no “meaning” unless I understand the language—the message

the meteorologist understands perfectly is gibberish to a chemist.

Communion, however, does not work well if the group is very large.

It requires constant reaffirmation. It requires the ability to

interpret. It requires a community. “I know what this message

means because I know how our people think in Tokyo, or in London,

or in Beijing.” I know is the catalyst that converts “information”

into “communications.”

For fifty years, from the early days of the Great Depression to

the 1970s, the trend ran toward centralization and bigness. Prior

to 1929, doctors did not put their paying patients into hospitals

except for surgery. Very few babies before the 1920s were born in

hospitals; the majority were born at home. The dynamics of higher

education in the United States as late as the 1930s were in the

small and medium-size liberal arts colleges. After World War II,

they shifted increasingly to the big university and to the even

bigger “research university.” The same thing happened in

government. And after World War II, bigness became an obsession in

business. Every firm had to be a “billion-dollar corporation.”

In the 1970s the tide turned. No longer is it the mark of good

government to be bigger. In health care we now assert that

whatever can be done outside the hospital better be done

elsewhere. Before the 1970s, even mildly sick mental patients in

the United States were considered to be best off in a mental

hospital. Since then, mental patients who are no threat to others

have been pushed out of the hospital (not always with good

results). We have moved away from the worship of size that

characterized the first three quarters of the century and

especially the immediate post–World War II period. We are rapidly

restructuring and “divesting” big business. We are, especially in

the United States, pushing governmental tasks away from the center

and toward local government in the country. We are “privatizing”

and farming out governmental tasks, especially in the local

community, to small outside contractors.

Increasingly, therefore, the question of the right size for a

task will become a central one. Is this task best done by a bee, a

hummingbird, a mouse, a deer, or an elephant? All of them are

needed, but each for a different task and in a different ecology.

The right size will increasingly be whatever handles most

effectively the information needed for task and function. Where

the traditional organization was held together by command and

control, the “skeleton” of the information-based organization will

be the optimal information system.

From Analysis to Perception

Technology is not nature, but humanity. It is not about tools;

it is about how people work. It is equally about how they live and

how they think. There is a saying of Alfred Russel Wallace, the

co-discoverer—with Charles Darwin—of the theory of evolution: “Man

is the only animal capable of directed and purposeful evolution;

he makes tools.” But precisely because technology is an extension

of human beings, basic technological change always both expresses

our worldview and, in turn, changes it.

The computer is in one way the ultimate expression of the

analytical, the conceptual worldview of a mechanical universe that

arose in Denis Papin’s time, the late seventeenth century. It

rests, in the last analysis, on the discovery of Papin’s

contemporary and friend, the philosopher-mathematician Gottfried

Leibniz, that all numbers can be expressed “digitally,” that is,

by 1 and 0. It became possible because of the extension of this

analysis beyond numbers to logic in Bertrand Russell and Alfred N.

Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (published from 1910 through

1913), which showed that any concept can be expressed by 1 and 0

if made unambiguous and into “data.”

But while it is the triumph of the analytical and conceptual

model that goes back to Papin’s own master, René Descartes, the

computer also forces us to transcend that model. “Information”

itself is indeed analytical and conceptual. But information is the

organizing principle of every biological process. Life, modern

biology teaches, is embodied in a “genetic code,” that is, in

programmed information. Indeed, the sole definition of that

mysterious reality “life” that does not invoke the supernatural is

that it is matter organized by information. And biological process

is not analytical. In a mechanical phenomenon the whole is equal

to the sum of its parts and therefore capable of being understood

by analysis. Biological phenomena are, however, “wholes.” They are

different from the sum of their parts. Information is indeed

conceptual. But meaning is not; it is perception.

In the worldview of the mathematicians and philosophers, which

Denis Papin and his contemporaries formulated, perception was

“intuition” and either spurious or mystical, elusive, mysterious.

Science did not deny its existence (though a good many scientists

did). It denied its validity. “Intuition,” the analysts asserted,

can neither be taught nor trained. Perception, the mechanical

worldview asserts, is not “serious” but is relegated to the “finer

things of life,” the things we can do without. We teach “art

appreciation” in our schools as indulgence in pleasure. We do not

teach art as the rigorous, demanding discipline it is for the

artist.

In the biological universe, however, perception is at the

center. And it can—indeed it must—be trained and developed. We do

not hear “C” “A” “T”; we hear “cat.” “C” “A” “T” are “bits,” to

use the modern idiom; they are analysis. Indeed, the computer

cannot do anything that requires meaning unless it goes beyond

bits. That is what “expert systems” are about; they attempt to put

into the logic of the computer, into an analytical process, the

perception of experience that comes from understanding the whole

of a task or subject matter.

In fact, we had begun to shift toward perception well before

the computer. Almost a century ago, in the 1890s, configuration

(Gestalt) psychology first realized that we hear “cat” and not “C”

“A” “T.” It first realized that we perceive. Since then almost all

psychology—whether developmental, behavioral, or clinical—has

shifted from analysis to perception. Even post-Freudian

“psychoanalysis” is becoming “psychoperception” and attempts to

understand the person rather than his or her mechanisms, the

“drives.” In governmental and business planning, we increasingly

talk of “scenarios” in which a perception is the starting point.

And, of course, any “ecology” is perception rather than analysis.

In an ecology, the “whole” has to be seen and understood, and the

“parts” exist only in contemplation of the whole.

When some fifty years ago the first American college—Bennington

in Vermont—began to teach the doing of art—painting, sculpture,

ceramics, playing an instrument—as integral parts of a liberal

arts education, it was a brazen, heretical innovation that defied

all respectable academic conventions. Today, every American

college does this. Forty years ago the public universally rejected

nonobjective modern painting. Now the museums and galleries

showing the works of modern painters are crowded and their works

fetch record prices. What is “modern” about modern painting is

that it attempts to present what the painter sees rather than what

the viewer sees. It is meaning rather than description.

Three hundred years ago, Descartes said, “I think therefore I

am.” We will now have to say also, “I see therefore I am.” Since

Descartes, the accent has been on the conceptual. Increasingly, we

will balance the conceptual and the perceptual. Indeed, the new

realities are configurations and as such call for perception as

much as for analysis: the dynamic disequilibrium of the new

pluralisms, for instance; the multitiered transnational economy

and the transnational ecology; the new archetype of the “educated

person” that is so badly needed. And The New Realities attempts as

much to make us see as it attempts to make us think.

It took more than a hundred years after Descartes and his

contemporary, Galileo, had laid the foundations for the science of

the mechanical universe, until Immanuel Kant produced the

metaphysics that codified the new worldview. His Kritik der reinen

Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) then dominated Western

philosophy for more than a century. It defined the meaningful

questions even for Kant’s adversaries, such as Friedrich

Nietzsche. Indeed, Kant still defined “knowledge” even for Ludwig

Wittgenstein in the first half of the twentieth century. But

contemporary philosophers no longer focus on Kant’s concerns. They

deal with configurations—with signs and symbols, with patterns,

with myth, with language. They deal with perception. Thus the

shift from the mechanical to the biological universe will

eventually require a new philosophical synthesis. Kant might have

called it Einsicht, or a Critique of Pure Perception.

AFTERWORD:

THE CHALLENGE AHEAD

We cannot yet tell with certainty what the next society and the

next economy will look like. We are still in the throes of a

transition period. Contrary to what most everybody believes,

however, this transition period is remarkably similar to the two

transition periods that preceded it during the nineteenth century:

the one in the 1830s and 1840s, following the invention of

railroads, postal services, telegraph, photography,

limited-liability business, and investment banking; and the second

one, in the 1870s and 1880s, following the invention of steel

making; electric light and electric power; synthetic organic

chemicals, sewing machines and washing machines; central heating;

the subway; the elevator and with it apartment and office

buildings and skyscrapers; the telephone and typewriter and with

them the modern office; the business corporation and commercial

banking. Both periods were characterized by the paradox of rapidly

expanding economy and growing income inequality—the paradox that

bedevils us now. And so, while we cannot yet say what the future

will be like, we can with very high probability, discern its main

and most important features, and some of its main and most

important challenges.

The first thing to say may well be that—again contrary to what

most everybody believes—it will not be a future of expanding, free

markets as we have understood free markets, that is, as markets

for the exchange of goods and services. On the contrary, those

markets may well shrink, if only because the growth sectors of

tomorrow’s society are surely going to be two knowledge areas,

health care and education, neither of which has ever been, or will

ever be, a truly free market. “Free market” tomorrow means flow of

information rather than trade. And in that respect, tomorrow will

indeed be a worldwide free market. This has serious implications

for all institutions, and not only for business. It means, for

instance, that every organization everywhere (and not only

businesses), will have to be globally competitive.

It also means that the center of gravity, and the center of

power, will be the customer. In the last thirty years, the center

of power has shifted from the supplier, the manufacturer, to the

distributor. In the next thirty years, it will certainly shift to

the customer—for the simple reason that the customer now has full

access to information worldwide.

We can also anticipate, with very high probability, that the

decline in the terms of trade (that is, the purchasing power) of

manufacturing, will continue and probably at an accelerated pace.

Beginning after World War I, if not in the late nineteenth

century, the purchasing power of primary products, especially of

farm products in relation to manufactured goods, began to go down

sharply. In the twentieth century, it went down at the rate of 1

percent a year compound, which means that by the year 2000

agricultural products bought only one-third of the manufactured

goods they had bought in 1900. Beginning in 1960, manufactured

goods began to decline in terms of relative purchasing power, that

is, in terms of trade, against knowledge goods. Between 1960 and

2000, prices of manufactured goods, adjusted for inflation, fell

by almost three-fifths, that is, by 60 percent. At the same time,

the prices of the two main knowledge products, health care and

education, went up three times as fast as inflation. Manufactured

goods by the year 2000 had therefore only about one-fifth of the

purchasing power relative to knowledge goods that they had had

only forty years earlier.

But the most important certainty is that the next society and

economy will have a totally different social complexion. It will

be a knowledge society with knowledge workers, the largest single

and by far the most expensive part of the workforce. In fact, this

has already happened in all developed countries.

And finally, we can say with near-certainty, the challenges we

will face in the next economy are management challenges that will

have to be tackled by individuals. Governments will be able to

help or hinder. But the tasks themselves are not tasks governments

can perform. They can only be performed through individual

organizations—both business enterprises and nongovernmental

nonprofit organizations—and by individuals. Government will not

become less pervasive, less powerful, let alone less expensive. It

will, however, increasingly depend for its effectiveness on what

managers and professionals are doing in and with their own

nongovernmental organization, and in and with their own lives.

I hope that The Essential Drucker will give the managers,

executives, and professionals of tomorrow the understanding of

both the society and economy they inherit, and the tools to

perform the tasks with which the next society and the next economy

will confront them.

—Peter F. Drucker

Claremont, California

Spring 2001

About the Author

Peter F. Drucker was born in 1909 in Vienna and was educated

there and in England. He received his doctorate in public and

international law while working as a newspaper reporter in

Frankfurt, Germany, and then worked as an economist for an

international bank in London. In 1927, he came to the United

States. Drucker’s management books and analyses of economics and

society are widely read and respected throughout the world and

have been translated into more than 20 languages. He also has

written a lively autobiography, two novels, and several volumes of

essays. He has been a frequent contributor to various magazines

and journals over the years and is an editorial columnist for The

Wall Street Journal.

http://www.esnips.com/web/eb00ks